Developing a multifunctional network laboratory for teaching and research

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Developing a multifunctional network laboratory for teaching and research

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Conference On Information Technology Education (formerly CITC) archive
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on SIG-information technology education table of contents

Fairfax, Virginia, USA

SESSION: Networking 1 table of contents

Pages 155-160

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-765-3

Authors

Xiaojun Cao	Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Yang Wang	Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Adrian Caciula	Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Yichuan Wang	Gerogia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Sponsor

SIGITE: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 6, Downloads (12 Months): 6, Citation Count: 0

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ABSTRACT

Adequate hands-on experience on networking and computing is becoming vital and necessary for students majored in programs such as Information Technology and Computer Science. However, building a hands-on experimental lab environment turns out to be challenging for many institutions, particularly for a new-born program or an urban university, due to space constraints, budget limitations, maintenance difficulty and so on. This paper presents and explores the design of a multifunctional lab environment for both teaching and research while taking the cost and space challenges into consideration. On one hand, the lab utilizes a number of industrial-strength Cisco routers, switches and wireless access points to setup a practical platform that allows students to configure and administrate their network design by applying the knowledge learned in the classroom. On the other hand, the lab is equipped with useful (and mostly free) software packages such as OPNET, Network Simulator (NS-2), Virtual PC, and CPLEX, which enable students to conduct various network modeling, simulation, optimization, and emulation together with their research projects. Accordingly, each iteration for the lab design and implementation as well as experiences learned and future integration with additional curriculum, are presented in this paper.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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