The cnet network simulator (v1.4)

cnet is a networking simulator which enables experimentation with various data-link layer, network layer, routing and transport layer networking protocols. It has been specifically developed for, and used in, undergraduate computer networking courses by thousands of students since 1991. At The University of Western Australia, cnet is used primarily in Chris McDonald's Computer Networks (IT312) undergraduate unit.

cnet is currently supported on a variety of common UNIX platforms, running under XView, Motif or TclTk. The Macintosh and Win-32 platforms are the next targets. We are extremely grateful to the Apple University Consortium for providing a Power Macintosh 7500/100 on which cnet is being further developed.

Further information available from here:

Acknowledgments

The following people have generously offered suggestions, pieces of code, and acted as testers, as cnet has developed over the years. A big thanks to them all:

Dr Greg Baur	University of Western Kentucky
Prof. John Hine	University of Wellington, New Zealand
Dr Chris Johnson	The Australian National University
Dr David Laverell	Calvin College, Michigan
A/Prof. Phil MacKenzie	Boise State University, Idaho
Prof. Jeff Ondich	Carleton College, Minnesota
Dr Chris Pudney	The University of Western Australia
Mike Robins	The University of Western Australia
Prof. James Wilkinson	College of Charleston, South Carolina

If you can show that you're a member of academic staff somewhere (business card, FAX on University letterhead, or Web page), I'll email some more detailed examples to you - ones that may typically be set for student projects.

If you decide to use cnet in the teaching of an undergraduate course, or need some more info on how to, please let me know. I'd like to keep a record of sites using cnet and the types of examples and projects being attempted. I'll also be able to keep you informed of updates. Excellent examples, such as those written by Aric Stewart and supervised by Prof. Jeff Ondich, and testimonials are welcome.

References

[McD91]: A Network Specification Language and Execution Environment for Undergraduate Teaching, C.S. McDonald, Proc. of the ACM Computer Science Education Technical Symposium '91, San Antonio, Texas, Mar 1991, pp25-34.
[McD93]: Network Simulation Using User-level Context Switching, C.S. McDonald, Proc. of the Australian UNIX Users' Group Conference '93, Sydney, Sept 1993, pp1-10.
[McD96]: Teaching Computer Networking Principles Using Simulation
Handouts from Chris McDonald's ACM-SIGCSE'96 workshop (compressed to 320K).

cnet was written and is maintained by Chris McDonald (chris@cs.uwa.edu.au)