A Graduate Engineering Technology Course in Networks for the Industrial Environment

This paper describes the development of a new graduate engineering technology course in advanced networks for industrial environments. The course is intended to provide an in-depth overview of high-performance wired and wireless networks for industrial control, communications, and computing. The emphasis is on understanding current and newly emerging network architectures, protocols, and technologies in terms of performance, network services, ease of implementation, maintenance, reliability, risk, and cost. The course is currently offered entirely online. To address the challenge of providing hands-on experience with network protocols, experiments with two industry-standard modeling and evaluation tools, OPNET’s IT Guru and Wireshark, are used. In addition, Adobe Connect is used to support real-time student presentations. Testing of the course material using a group of undergraduate students and one graduate student with little previous understanding of computer and industrial networks indicated that the students learned a substantial amount about these topics.