ilabS — Measuring the Internet

The iLabs are a very successful teaching series about distributed systems and networking. Together, the iLabs reached far more than 2000 students between 2004 and 2018. The iLabs currently consist of five courses:

• iLab - Build your own Internet (since 2004),
• iLab2 - You set the Focus! (since 2010), and
• iLabX - The virtual Internet Laboratory (since 2018) are lab courses that I designed that run very successfully with more than 2000 participants at different German Universities.
• iLabS - Secure Internet Measurements (since 2018),
• iLabX - The Internet Masterclass (since 2019).

iLabS - Measuring the Internet teaches you how to measure relevant properties of today's Internet. This includes DNS or BGP message monitoring and data analytics. A special feature of the course is that it contains collaboration between the students in Sydney and the ones in Munich!

In autumn 2017 I applied for a grant together with my friend Ralph Holz from University of Sydney. We were lucky and received 7000 AUD for creating something new: the iLabS, where the S stands for Security and for Sydney.

Ralph knows the iLab concept very well as he was teaching with it in Tübingen after my leave there. We had the idea to create an iLab that corresponds with his current teaching in Sydney on Internet measurements.

Using my Create your own exercise as background, we managed to enable the students at Technical University of Munich to create a very nice set of exercises while Ralph was visiting in summer 2018.

Three of the exercises ran very successfully for the first time in Sydney in October 2018. On my visit in November we planned improvements and the interaction with the Munich students.

The iLabS shows perfectly how the iLab concept can be used for exercises that accompany a lecture. A full success!