Internet Performance and Troubleshooting Lab

Professors: Marco Mellia Nikhil Jha

Official description of the course: here

The Internet Performance and Troubleshooting Lab is experimental. Students will work in groups in laboratories and face different experiments of increasing complexity. The professor will guide them in setting up the experiments, use proper measurement and traffic generator tools, and challenge the students to understand wrong setups or malfunctioning scenarios. Students will learn how to configure LAN or WiFi networks, interconnect networks using routing protocols, use passive traffic analyzers and high-performance traffic generators to measure the web or application performance and identify and solve problems. Students will face lab sessions of increasing complexity, acquiring a critical approach and the scientific methodology toward understanding complex systems such as the Internet.

Students will work in the Laboratory using PCs running Linux OS. Working in groups of three students, they will set up experiments by configuring LANs with Ethernet switches and WiFi access points, and learn how to configure routing and routing protocols. At the end of the course, students will use real traffic traces collected from real networks to understand how complex application services work on the Internet.