An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet PracticallyWorks

摘要

Each year at ETH Zurich, around 100 students collectively buildand operate their very own Internet infrastructure composed ofhundreds 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 ourstudents how the Internet infrastructure practically works. Amongothers, our students have a much deeper understanding of Internetoperations alongside their pitfalls. Besides students tend to love theproject: clearly the fact that all of them need to cooperate for theentire Internet to work is empowering.In this paper, we describe the overall design of our teachingplatform, how we use it, and interesting lessons we have learntover the years. We also make our platform openly available [2].