Enabling remote access to computer networking laboratories for distance education

Academic organizations that provide students with the facilities for experimenting and learning basic and advanced concepts in networking rely on computer networking laboratories. These facilities can be implemented in many ways with varying degrees of cost, management complexity and capabilities. The benefits of these facilities can be extended by enabling remote access to them for distance education purposes. Providing remote access capabilities to these facilities with the objective of offering the learning experience of a computer networking laboratory to distance education students of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) programs is a challenging task. This paper provides a description and a comparative analysis of the implementation of three different computer network laboratory setups for which remote access was enabled and discusses lessons learned and good practices for similar setups.