The explosive growth and the ubiquitous use of the Internet has created a need for scientists and engineers, who can maintain, debug, and innovate the Internet infrastructure. The goal of this lab is to provide a deep understanding of the protocols and algorithms underlying to the Internet. Among others, this will cover principles of addressing, routing, error control, flow- and congestion control, as well as performance evaluation. As there is today an increasing need for hands-on experience, the students use existing network hardware to create own network examples and receive by real observations of the network traffic a deep insight and an extensive understanding about the functional way of the Internet. In this way the lab transfers theoretical network knowledge acquired in the lecture Communication Networks into practical experience.
Lab 1 - Introduction to the Internet Lab Overview of the Lab equipment Basic Linux commands Packet-sniffer: whireshark and tcpdump
Lab 2 - Single Segment IP Networks Configuring a network interface for IP networking Address translation and resolution with ARP Security problems of common Internet applications.
Lab 3 - Static routing IP forwarding and routing between IP networks; Setup a Linux PC and a Cisco router as an IP router Interpretation and manual configuration of routing tables Routing loops
Lab 4 - Dynamic Routing Protocols Routing protocols RIP and OSPF Dynamics and convergence properties of routing protocols Count-to-infinity problem in RIP Hierarchical routing in OSPF
Lab 5 - Transport Protocols: UDP and TCP Data transmissions with TCP and UDP Performance of data transmission using UDP and TCP Enhanced TCP aspects: Connection management Flow and congestion control Retransmissions algorithms
For literature, we will use the Mastering Networks book and the instructions based on it.
Liebeherr, Jorg, and Magda El Zarki. Mastering Networks: An Internet Lab Manual. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 2003.