Objective

Researchers

Research Summary

Publications

ITL Usage

The ITL will provide students with hands-on design, setup, configure, and manage network devices and their applications. In addition, the ITL will provide researchers and educators with a controlled environment to validate and evaluate their research, education, and training programs. We are in the process of  integrating the ITL with the existing network courses that educate undergraduate and graduate students about the fundamental design, analysis, operation, control and management of networked systems. The ITL will enable undergraduate and graduate students to better understand and get hands-on experience in: 

• Setup and configure network interfaces and routers. 
• Setup the appropriate software to measure network traffic and events and how to interpret the collected data and events. 
• Understand how communications protocols work and how to configure them to improve performance, and/or satisfy certain requirements. 
• Experiment with network management tools to better understand the operation, configuration of network devices, and how to analyze their performance, faults, security, etc. 

The topology of the ITL will be initially built around three CISCO 7000 routers with RP/SSP or RSP processor. In addition to the FDDI network that interconnect these routers, the CISCO routers are also connected to ATM and Ethernet networks. We will evaluate and benchmark different techniques to interconnect different network technologies. Students will be able to gain practical experience in routing, priority queueing, routing redistribution, BGP characteristics relating to listening to routing advertisements, various routing protocols and their effect on the overall performance. The three CISCO routers will be configured to support the following types of experiments: 

Router to Router Connection
In this set of experiments, we have two sets of routers, two routers in each set, to support experiments that allow students of setup and configure the routers to interconnect (back-to-back) using Ethernet, T1, FDDI, and ATM. The two sets will allow us to support more students conducting these types of experiments at the same time. 

Router Backbone Network
In this set of experiments, we will use the four routers to build a heterogeneous network with various configurations. For example, students can configure the backbone network such that  routers are connected through an Ethernet, FDDI, and ATM backbone. In addition, we could ask students to establish another route different from the backbone network using back-to-back connections using T1 and Ethernet. 

Computing Platforms
The lab will have a cluster of workstations running Unix operating system and a cluster of PCs running Window operating systems. The number of machines will be at least  20 machines, 10 runs the Unix while the second 10 runs Microsoft window. 

We will integrate the ITL with the ATM High Performance Distributed Computing Laboratory  (HPDC) (www.ece.arizona.edu/~hpdc).  The network topology of the HPDC Laboratory is based on a Cabletron MMAC-Plus Enterprise Switch, an IBM 8260 ATM Switch and an IBM 8285 Workgroup ATM Switch. The ATM switches (IBM 8260 and MMAC-Plus) provide 155 Mbps ATM connections for the workstations and PCs. The IBM 8285 ATM Switch provides 25 Mbps ATM connections for PCs. In addition to the 155 Mbps and 25 Mbps ATM connections, all the workstations and PCs in the HPDC Laboratory are also connected to the ECE network through a 10 Mbps Ethernet LAN.