Network learning: a top-down implementation based approach

Computer networking is an important enabling technology in this Internet era and is widely taught as part of various computer science and computer engineering undergraduate and graduate curricula, as either an elective or a required course. It is imperative that computer networking courses taught at the undergraduate level contain adequate hands-on implementation based projects and experiments in order to better train students. In this paper, we discuss an approach that provides a sequence of short-term projects with a common goal that help students understand the various components of the network protocol stack. We present different project scenarios in order to illustrate the proposed approach. Some of the projects have been used in courses taught previously; others are proposed for future courses