GENI in the classroom

Abstract

One of the great successes of GENI has been its use as a remote laboratory by instructors of networking, distributed systems and cloud computing classes. It allows instructors to provide hands-on learning experiences on a real, large-scale network. Reasons for this success include GENI’s ease of use, access to resources such as programmable switches and wireless base stations that are not ordinarily available at most schools, support for collaborative experimentation and ease of recovering from mistakes. The GENI community has created and made available to instructors ready-to-use exercises based on popular networking textbooks. These exercises cover a range of topics from basic networking to advanced concepts such as software defined networking and network function virtualization. They include wired and wireless networking based exercises. GENI is also used as a platform for applications that enhance STEM education at the highschool level and as a platform for MOOC courses that use an interactive approach to teach Internet concepts to non-computer scientists.