CSCI 342: Networks

Semester:	Spring 2013
Room:	Kng 227
Class Time:	Mon/Wed/Fri 2:30pm-3:20pm
Office Hours:	Monday,  3:30-4:30pm Thursday, 4:30-5:30pm or by appointment

Professor:	Cynthia Taylor
email:	ctaylor AT oberlin edu Please include "cs342" in the subject.
Office:	King 229
Phone:	x58424

Homework 6 - FAST Reliable Delivery over an Unreliable Link

Homework Description

The sample code for this lab is available here.

This homework is continuation of hw5 with addition of pipelining. You can either use your solution of hw5 or the template.

To simulate an unreliable link in a single computer, you still need to run mininet. Like homework 5, run the following command and change the delay, loss and buffer size parameter.

sudo mn --link tc,delay='10ms',loss=5,max_queue_size=10 -x

At a high level, your job is to change the reliable transport protocol implementation in the template so that the following example execution always produces the correct result.

In one terminal (say h2), you run the receiver in the following way, and it produces output as shown below.

./hw5_receiver BASEPORT > RECEIVED_FILE
# later on, this happens...
File received, exiting.

In a separate terminal of h1, you run the sender:

cat ORIGINAL_FILE | ./hw5_sender 10.0.0.2 BASEPORT
Sent 1020544 bytes in 25 seconds: 35 kB/s
Estimated RTT: 1029 ms

A few things to pay attention to:

• hw6_sender.c, hw6_receiver.c - these are to be thought of as 'applications', using the 'library' you implement in hw6.c. You may change these files, but we will use the original files when grading.
• hw6.c - this is where your code should go. You will need to make major changes to rel_socket(), rel_connect(), rel_send(), rel_receive() and rel_close(). The file transferred: your program should work for any file, and reproduce it exactly. You can check this with the md5sum utility, or diff.
• The RTT: you are to dynamically estimate the RTT using the EWMA technique, and use this to set your timeout period. With correctly tuned timeouts, lower RTT will result in higher throughput.
• Keep your packets smaller than or equal to MAX_PACKET (1400 bytes).
• In case you buffer the packets and close the connection before you send all the packets, thoughput is also calculated in hw6_receiver. Make sure there is no significant difference between the throughputs of both sender and receiver.

Finally:

• Pay attention to the end of the connection. Ensure that both sides of the connection finish without user assistance, even if packet losses occur, while guaranteeing that the entire file is transferred. Look at the FIN/FINACK/ACK sequence in TCP for ideas.

Hints

• For trying out your code, you can tune the packet loss ratios and round-trip latencies by changing the parameters when creating the mininet. You may want to especially pay attention to the max_queue_size parameter, as this controls how many packets can be in the network at a time.
  
• In rel_close(), you may want to just wait for some time, to make sure the last ack didn't get lost (leaving one end hanging).

Grading

The grading script is availabe here. Note that these files must be in the same directory as your program to work.

The script runs 10 times for each case and regard it as success if more than 7 throughput are faster than the threshold.

[SUCCESS] buf=2 loss=0% threshold=14 [1]: 1 [throughput(kB/s)= 37.0 32.5 28.3 27.8 42.3 28.2 28.5 27.6 28.8 28.4] mean=30.94 kB/s
[SUCCESS] buf=2 loss=5% threshold=2.1 [1]: 1 [throughput(kB/s)= 14.8 13.8 16.7 21.5 9.8 15.2 14.0 7.4 9.4 13.3] mean=13.59 kB/s
[SUCCESS] buf=10 loss=0% threshold=80 [1]: 1 [throughput(kB/s)= 151.2 151.1 151.5 151.3 151.1 151.3 151.9 151.1 151.5 151.5] mean=151.35 kB/s
[SUCCESS] buf=10 loss=5% threshold=10 [1]: 1 [throughput(kB/s)= 19.0 28.4 38.1 21.7 20.5 17.4 11.3 15.6 27.0 14.8] mean=21.38 kB/s
[SUCCESS] buf=100 loss=0% threshold=85 [1]: 1 [throughput(kB/s)= 162.4 162.3 162.3 162.3 162.2 161.3 162.3 162.4 162.3 162.3] mean=162.21 kB/s
[SUCCESS] buf=100 loss=5% threshold=10 [1]: 1 [throughput(kB/s)= 31.5 48.8 33.8 19.9 28.4 37.5 32.7 40.0 28.5 46.6] mean=34.77 kB/s

Total score: 6

This script is NOT how I will be determining your final grades for this assignment. However, it should give you a good idea of how your program is performing.

Handin

We will be using Handin to turn in all assignments. Turn this in for class 342, assignment 6.