III. THE APPLICATION OF SIMULATION SOFTWARE
When we taught the network topology, IP address and
routing protocols, we found thatstudents couldn’t understand
these contents completely without practicing the experiments.
Then we will arrange students do some experiments on the real
devices such as routers and switches. But for the limit of
amount of the devices, the time and numbers of the real
experiments for the students are not enough. Therefore, we
suggest the students to use simulation software to simulate the
experiments in their spare time.
There are much network simulation software such as Boson,
RouterSim, CIM and etc which simulate the work process of
routers and switches. They can simulate the equipment
configuration, control and planning or validation of the
network, but not need the real network equipments. It is
convenient for users to use the network topologies inside the
software or designed by them. We can use simulation software
to understand the network knowledge and do the relevant
experiments.
Boson NetSim software, for instance, consists of three parts:
Network Designer, Control Panel and Lab Navigator. Boson
NetSim can be used for many oriented applications. Network
Designer allows users to design and plan a network. Users can
actually create the router configurations which are going to be
used, saving those configurations, and uploading them to real
routers. It brings into correspondence with the latest IOS
version of the Cisco’s devices. It has many well designed labs,
such as the basic configuration of routers and switches, Virtual
LAN (VLAN), static routing, the routing protocols and etc. In
the software, there are also detailed steps to implement these
labs. Students can easily design the topology themselves and
then configure the devices after studying the configuration
steps of the inside labs.
For instance, we find some student can not understand the
characters of the IP address. For example, IP address has a
character that the hosts with the same network id are in the
same network and the hosts with the different network id are in
the different network. Students can not understand the meaning
of same network and different network. In order to help
students to understand these concepts, we designed the
topology diagram as shown in Fig.1 to verify that all the hosts