DTLSR: Delay-Tolerant Link-State Routing

LSR and DTLSR are routing protocols for running on network routers. They use a link-state representation of the network topology for routing. DTLSR is LSR with modifications that allow it to perform better in unreliable, variable-delay network conditions, making it delay-tolerant.

This is my third-year dissertation project for the University of Cambridge Computer Science tripos. The project is to evaluate and compare the performance of LSR and DTLSR in a variety of network topologies and situations, to determine where delay-tolerant modifications improve or worsen performance. Both protocols are modelled off of standard OSPF, but implemented completely from scratch.

CORE: Common Open Research Emulator

CORE is a tool for emulating networks on a single machine, using topologies of lightweight virtual machines running Unix. For this project I disable the included routing protocols and replace them with my implementation, which is thus fully functional on real Unix machines.

CORE also provides a Python API for scripting, which allows modifying network conditions in real time and extracting testing data. This is used extensively for evaluation.

Project Link: nrl.navy.mil/core

Quick Start

Install

CORE install. I've tested with 7.5.2, versions above have breaking changes.

git clone git@github.com:coreemu/core.git
cd core
git checkout release-7.5.2
./install.sh

DTLSR install.

git clone git@github.com:benmandrew/DTLSR.git dtlsr
sudo apt-get install check libpcap-dev tcpreplay net-tools

Copy dtlsr.py (located in core-py/ in dtlsr) into daemon/core/services/ directory in core

Required Python libraries:

sudo -i
pip3 install netaddr mako fabric lxml pyproj

Building

cmake .
make
## Run unit tests
ctest -VV

Running

Pass dt argument to use DTLSR instead of LSR

cd core-py
sudo python3 main.py [dt]

View Node Logs

node_id is of the form n1, n2, etc.

cd tools
python3 logs.py [node_id] [protocol]
## example
python3 logs.py n1 dtlsr

Run Command on Node

cd tools
python3 vcmd.py [node_id] [command]
## example
python3 vcmd.py n3 ping 10.0.0.6