Lab Description

Students will learn how to put "principles into practice" in the Computer Networks Lab. The lab is a miniature version of the Internet. The available equipment is sufficient to emulate many traffic scenarios found on the real Internet and to teach TCP/IP protocols and data communication to students, and to give them hands-on experience on networking. The lab has modular Internet rack equipment. Each rack has 4 Cisco 2811 Integrated Services Routers, a 3Com switch, 4 PCs as internet hosts, 4 switches, 1 KVM switch and its set (LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse), cables and connectors. One set of rack equipment is used by 4 students in lab experiments. Currently there are 6 racks in the lab, and since the design of the lab is modular and scalable, it can be easily extended if it is needed in the future. 

The lab experiments cover some of the important Internet protocols, including IP, ARP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, routing protocols (RIP, OSPF, BGP), and application-level protocols (DNS, HTTP, FTP, TELNET). In addition to an in-depth study of the Internet protocols in real network settings, you will gain hands-on experience working on networking equipment and acquire useful networking skills. By putting computer networking into practice, this lab aims to teach how network protocols work and how networked systems interact.

There are about 12 lab sections and and 10 different labs. Each lab consists of a prelab, lab session, and a postlab report. Prelab will be individual work. The lab exercises and postlab reports will be completed in groups of 4. The lab exercises are completed without supervision and require on the average 3 hours of work.