TeachNet: A Lightweight and User-Friendly Network Visualization and Experimentation Tool

Abstract

Network researchers, academics, and students often need to deal with complex scripting in order to design a network topology, configure network nodes, automate experimentation, and visualize network performance metrics. Current simulation or emulation tools lack the ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of the network. This paper introduces TeachNet, a lightweight and user-friendly network tool that provides a graphical user interface for designing, configuring, and automating network experiments. We explain TeachNet’s design and present results to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency using our TCP experimentation-focused prototype, and Mininet in the backend. TeachNet creates a repository of log files and offers a framework for future research that is easily extensible to accommodate other tools such as OMNeT++ and ns3.