A Visual Teaching and Learning Environment for the Open Shortest Path First Routing Protocol
Jesús Urbáez
Arturo Palacios
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A Visual Teaching and Learning Environment for the Open Shortest Path First Routing Protocol | ||
| Published in: | Engineering for a Smarter Planet: Innovation, ITC, and Computational Tools for Sustainable Development: Proceedings of the 9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology | |
| Date of Conference: | August 3-5, 2011 | |
| Location of Conference: | Medellin, Colombia | |
| Authors: | Eric Gamess Jesús Urbáez Arturo Palacios | |
| Refereed Paper: | #296 | |
Abstract | ||
| In this paper we present Easy-OSPF, an implementation of the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol developed in C#. Its main goal is to be used as a didactic application in introductory and advanced network courses to support the teaching and learning of OSPF. It allows clarifying the complex and abstract theory of OSPF through virtual laboratories using graphics, images, and animations, which can be easily transformed in knowledge. Easy-OSPF offers a user-friendly, flexible and robust graphical user interface that allows users to configure all relevant aspects of the network and the OSPF protocol. It also provides a network viewer, an integrated sniffer, and a protocol table viewer. The initial teaching experiments that we conducted with the usage of Easy-OSPF indicate that it can dramatically facilitate the learning of OSPF. Additionally, Easy-OSPF can be used in a production network as a functional but limited implementation of the OSPF protocol. | ||