Experience Report: Using the FABRIC Testbed to teach a Graduate Computer Networking course

The curriculum for a graduate Computer Networking course in Computer Science typically includes activities that help students gain a variety of practical skills that complement the theoretical knowledge they learn during the course. These skills are developed through exercises that present students with scenarios in which they are to understand or cause specific communication behavior over a network. These exercises are constrained by the computer resources that students use for learning. Ideally those resources can be tuned to increase the fidelity of the network that a student is managing-and ultimately allow each student to fully control their own network.