Contents I. Introduction
The quesiton of how students gain hands-on experience to pursue engineering careers enough to persist in rigorous courses is broadly accepted as critical. However, this often requires sizeable financial investment in specialized laboratories and significant time for lab setup and software and hardware update every quarter/semester. Such requirements are not only heavy burden on instructors and educational institutions but also incovenient to students. This is especially true for those students who study in regional institutions and colleges as well as live in rural areas where, many times, schools, while having technology infrastructure, lack both well-equipped laboratories and teachers prepared to teach new advanced courses. Moreover, physical laboratories are not convenient to access by nontraditional students and not flexible in their lab experiments. Furthermore, a physical networking laboratory is not appropriate for a variety of network topologies. An alternative way is to use simulation software, such as NS2 and OPNET for computer network labs (see Shull et al. [1] and Stallings [2].) However, such a way does not provide students with real-world network operating experience.
