Communication Simulator with Network Behavior Logging Function for Supporting Network Construction Exercise for Beginners

Abstract

Interconnecting virtual machines realizes computer networks on ordinary personal computers. Such a technique enables each student instead of a group to construct networks in network exercises for beginners. In the exercises, students may ask teachers to judge the correctness/incorrectness of their networks and to support the debugging for their networks. The waiting time of students can be long because the number of teachers is less than the number of students. An effective solution to this problem is to develop a system that can judge whether students’ networks are correct and visualize the behavior of students’ networks as hints. Detail logs of network behavior are necessary for realizing such a system. Here, we propose a communication simulator to record network behavior in detail during request/response communications, which are the transmissions of request data (e.g., icmp echo request) and the corresponding response data (e.g., icmp echo reply).