GENI-Enabled Programming Experiments for Networking Classes

Although GENI has been readily embraced by the research community as a testbed for exploring new network architectures and services, its use as an educational tool has not seen the same level of acceptance and usage. There are multiple reasons for this, not the least of which is a lack of good examples showing how to use GENI in an educational setting. This paper attempts to remedy this by describing our experiences using GENI in our networking classes at the University of Kentucky. Using GENI as the experimental basis for the projects in our classes allowed us to leverage several of its rich set of features including its global span of resources, programmability, virtualization, and instrumentation and measurement tools. In particular, we describe two projects that we have used in our networking classes, and we share some of the experience we gained in the process. As a result, these experiences motivated us to develop and integrate new functions into the GENI desktop in order to make it easier to access and control GENI's various resources and tools.