VNS is the easiest way to give students hands-on experience with networking internals. It has been used by thousands of students at more than 25 universities (see who’s using it). With VNS, students write software that interacts with their own topology of routers and servers using real-world services and protocols.

VNS is available free of charge to students, instructors, and researchers. It is an open-source project supported by staff and students at Stanford University. Assignments include a variety of tools, including student stub code, grading scripts, and reference solutions. With assignments possible in C, C++, Java, Python, or any other language that supports standard sockets, VNS projects can be as small or as large as your students’ imaginations.

VNS can be used for:

• Classroom assignments, demos, and labs.
• Student research projects.
• Prototyping novel network protocols.

Getting Started

The Using VNS page explains how to get started using VNS. After looking over that page. please contact David Underhill (dgu@cs.stanford.edu) to obtain access to the system.

Learn More

You can learn more about how VNS works here. We’ve also published several papers about VNS which you can read here