Virtual Network System (VNS)

VNS is the fastest, easiest way to give students hands-on access to networking internals. Developed at Stanford University, VNS has been used by thousands of students at over a dozen schools across the country.

With VNS, students write software that interacts with their own topology of routers and servers, running real-world services and protocols. Designed to integrate with an undergraduate or graduate curriculum in computer networking, VNS is perfect for:

• Classroom assignments, demos and labs
• Student research projects
• Quickly prototyping novel network protocols

VNS is available free of charge to students, instructors, and researchers, with support provided 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, or any language that supports standard sockets, VNS projects can be as small or as large as the imaginations of your students.

VNS Users

• Carnegie Mellon University
• Stanford University (Nick McKeown — nickm@stanford.edu)
• Johns Hopkins University (Andreas Terzis — terzis@cs.jhu.edu)
• Princeton University (Jennifer Rexford — jrex@princeton.edu)
• Simon Fraser University (Mohamed Hefeeda — mhefeeda@cs.sfu.ca)
• University of Arizona (Beichuan Zhang — bzhang@arizona.edu)
• University of California, Irvine
• UCLA
• University of Chicago
• Washington State University

Users this Term (Fall 07)

In use since 2002, VNS continues to develop and grow. During the 2007-2008 year, we'll be making previews of Netplumber, our new expanded platform, available to our users.

The VNS project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grant 02-082. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or other sponsors of this project.