Innovative and easy-to-deploy communication networking laboratory experiments for electrical and computer engineering students

This paper describes a set of new laboratory experiments developed for the senior level undergraduate networking course at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University. These experiments differ from existing networking experiments in that they emphasize the understanding of the dynamics of network protocols in addition to their applications, which makes them more suitable for ECE curricula. Students learn through these experiments a wide range of networking aspects including the design and the limitations of protocols, simulation and performance evaluation techniques, interpretation of data, packet analysis and network programming. They are also required to read standardization documents in order to put them in a realistic engineering situation. All the experiments are software based, and the resource required is a workstation with C compiler and some public-domain software like Ethereal, so there is virtually no costs in deploying the experiments, and they can be done in almost any general-purpose computer laboratory.