On enabling remote hands-on Computer Networking Education: the NITOS testbed approach

Education in recent years has slowly transitioned to an online model, allowing massive access to online courses virtually from anywhere. The adoption of such educational models was boosted by the global pandemic in 2020, with universities and other degree programs quickly transitioning to such schemes. Although such a model is apt for lecture-based courses, hands-on training remains a puzzle on how it can transition to remote learning. In this work, we describe and evaluate our scheme for integrating testbed resources in online-taught networking-related courses in University of Thessaly, Greece. The framework is based on Kubernetes and is able to deliver hands-on labs related to networking as micro-services over the testbed architecture with minimal overhead on the lab setup from the instructor. The proposed approach has been applied in the networking-related courses of the curriculum during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years, educating more than 800 students on computer networking concepts in practice. The paper describes the framework and a benchmarking evaluation, which proves the capacity of the framework to serve up to 5 times higher numbers of students, compared to prior methodologies and practices, without any infrastructure upgrades.