ONL in Courses

The ONL testbed has been used successfully in courses during the spring 2006 semester. Below are links to their most recent Web pages (Spring 2008) and some initial reaction to their ONL experience.

• Computer Networks, Tilman Wolf, University of Massachusetts

  "The course is aimed at non-networking graduate students and fulfills a breadth requirement in our department. I used the ONL testbed in several lab exercises and was very happy with the outcomes. The students liked how the ONL labs helped them really understand how networks worked. They said the Remote Laboratory Interface (RLI) was easy to use to setup experiments and were quite self sufficient by Lab 2. In fact, the cool thing was that I could handle the entire Lab 2 remotely while I was in Barcelona for Infocom. With a conventional lab setup this would have been impossible."

• Protocols for Computer Networks, Sergey Gorinsky, Washington University

  "The graduate-level course covers computer network protocols and is aimed at students who have already taken an introductory networking course. The ONL testbed was the main evaluation platform in the lab exercises and individual course projects of all the students. I liked the realism of ONL that exposed the students to phenomena that traditional network simulators do not reflect. The students were challenged to think what and how to measure and what the collected data mean. I was impressed with the ability of the students to implement and visualize the results of their final projects which were on such topics as advanced algorithms for active queue management and fair link scheduling."

• Introduction to Computer Networks (Fall 2007), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis. taught by Sergey Gorinsky.
• Protocols for Computer Networks (Spring 2007), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis. taught by Sergey Gorinsky.
• Computer Networks (Spring 2007), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst taught by Tilman Wolf.

We are now developing more course material in support of networking courses. We are also developing routers based on network processors (NPs) and hope to continue this education effort after we integrate these NP-based routers to our testbed.