LEARNING ENHANCEMENT IN NETWORKING COURSE USING PACKET SNIFFER/ANALYZER

摘要

Introduction to Networking course is offered to students to get familiar with basic concepts of networking and data communications. Rapid advances in networking technologies present opportunities for innovative education at undergraduate and graduate level. 'Intro to Networks and Data Communication' and 'Network Fundamentals' courses become increasingly popular in colleges (including community colleges) and universities. These courses are provided as introductory courses to get the students familiar with the concepts and technologies in computer networking. However, there is a real concern with the lack of hands-on labs based active learning in computer science, engineering and technology curriculums. It is now well known that the best way of learning and teaching networking technologies is the hands-on project based learning. Wireshark based many hands-on labs are presented in this paper, as part of an undergraduate course of Intro to Networking which is the first course in series of networking courses. In learning the concepts of networks via Wireshark labs, students get ample opportunities to understand the underlying principles and concepts of networks. These labs are chosen to provide sufficient challenges to the students. For each hands-on lab, each student carries out the lab activities in order to successfully understand the particular layer of TCP/IP networking stack. This paper elaborates innovative Wireshark projects that are suitable for laboratory work in computer information technology and computer science curriculum and are now being used for practical exercises in networks courses. Mainly, those labs include activities such as finding details of HTTP, TCP, IP, and MAC protocols. In addition, labs are offered to enhance the learning of ICMP, ARP, UDP, DNS protocols.