An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works

In this talk, we would like to present a platform that we have been using in the last four years at ETH Zurich to teach our students how the Internet practically w …

In this talk, we would like to present a platform that we have been using in the last four years at ETH Zurich to teach our students how the Internet practically works. Our platform faithfully emulates the real Internet infrastructure and allows our students to operate their very own Internet infrastructure composed of hundreds of routers and dozens of Autonomous Systems (ASes). Their goal? Enabling Internet-wide connectivity.We find this class-wide project to be invaluable in teaching our students how the Internet practically works. Our students have gained a much deeper understanding of the various Internet mechanisms alongside with their pitfalls. Besides students tend to love the project: clearly the fact that all of them need to cooperate for the entire Internet to work is empowering. We have designed the platform to be flexible and scalable so that it can easily be adapted to other networking courses, and have open-sourced it at https://github.com/nsg-ethz/mini_internet_project.In a technical report (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.02031.pdf), we share our four year-long experience in teaching how the Internet works with the mini-Internet project. As we believe this platform can be useful for anyone who would like to understand or teach how the Internet actually works, we propose to introduce it during the next NANOG meeting.

Thomas Holterbach: Thomas Holterbach received the M.Sc. degree in computer science from Strasbourg University, France, in 2014. He is currently a fifth year PhD Student at ETH Zurich, in the Networked Systems Group. He is interested in Internet routing, measurements and now focuses on designing applications that run on programmable network hardware. At ETH Zurich, he is also a teaching assistant for several computer networks courses since 2016.