ITR: On a Virtual Laboratory for Network Engineering Educational Programs

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-0081761 Zhao, Wei Texas Engineering Experiment Station ITR: On a Virtual Laboratory for Network Engineering Educational Programs The primary objective of this proposed research is to investigate issues involved in building a virtual laboratory for network engineering educational programs. Different from a conventional teaching laboratory, the proposed virtual laboratory will not require students to physically present in the laboratory rooms, rather they conduct their experiments via remote network connections, such as the World Wide Web. The intent is to demonstrate that this kind of virtual laboratory facilitates the training of IT workers in a significant way: it will reduce the cost, increase the facility utilization, and improve the quality of IT courses that are experiment-oriented. This project will focus on addressing technical challenges that are critical for successful implementation and operation of such a virtual laboratory. Configuration and scheduling techniques will be studied that provide students with remote but real time access to the equipment during their experiments. These kinds of configurations must be carried out in an efficient and flexible manner so that a large number of students can do their experiments simultaneously. Access control methods will also be investigated that deal with the degree of control over network components given to the user. The efficacy of diverse access control methods will be examined over a range of implemented exercises. The aim is to build a virtual laboratory that allows an instructor to choose the interplay of operating system support, experiment semantics, and network support to best suit the learning environment.