By November 8, teachers and students of Brazilian universities will be able to apply to create practical exercises solved in the Fibre experimentation environment, documented as video-classes, to be used in computer network subjects. The call notice, published by the Brazilian National Research and Educational Network, is aimed at encouraging the educational use of the platform, allowing the computing students to have access to a real experimentation environment, instead of using simulators at laboratories. In the long term, the greater goal is to make the students and teachers more familiar with testbeds and programmable networks, in order to encourage Future Internet researches, that is, researches into new Internet architectures, as alternatives to the current network.

The applicants must choose one out of three exercises previously chosen from the book “Computer networking: a top-down approach” (Kurose and Ross, 6th edition), carry them out in the Fibre testbed, allocating resources into two of them, and edit a video-class, using authorship tool Cacuriá, that creates learning objects. The result of the selection shall be published on November 13.

Application form

According to RNP’s Communities and Advanced Applications manager, Leandro Ciuffo, the motivation behind the creation of the exercises is to make the first contact of the teachers and students with the testbed easier. “We thought of creating a repository of exercises proposed and solved that work as ready-made modules, which may be used directly by teachers in their subjects, serving as basis for the development of other exercises”, he stated.

The Fibre (Future Internet Brazilian Environment for Experimentation) experimentation environment is the result of a project chosen by the 1st coordinated call notice between Brazil and the European Union in 2010 for Information and Communication Technologies (TIC). Currently coordinated by RNP, it works as a large-scale virtual laboratory, for students and researchers to be able to test new network architecture applications and models. The testbed is currently formed by a federation of 11 of them, housed by Brazilian universities and research institutions.

“At a time when many of our universities are unable to implement local computer network laboratories, testbed Fibre works as a remote laboratory available for use at the classrooms, in the teaching of computer network and system subjects distributed to any university in the country”, Leandro Ciuffo stated.

Academic community develops Future Internet projects

For the continuous development of the Fibre experimentation environment, the technical committee of the program coordinated by RNP selected six short-term projects proposed by the academic community, which must implement proofs of concept in the following themes:

• Testbed on Internet of the Future based on Openstack – São Carlos Federal University (UFScar)
• Using XOS to manage experimental infrastructures – Pará Federal University (UFPA)
• Openvirtex in the Fibre environment - Federal University of the City of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
• Proposal for a Fibre-friendly WebGUI – Fluminense Federal University (UFF)
• Basic (wireless) resources control of a testbed using OMF 6 – Goiás Federal University (UFG)
• OpenFlow resources control, using OMF 6 – UFG

The projects began in October and shall last three months.