A tcp based client-server system using ns3 - networking

I am completely new to ns3. All the tutorials that are given in the repo mainly consist of echo servers where they are sending a packet of specific size and receiving the echo. I want to design a real world scenario where the server offers some service. e.g. the client node takes a string in lower case as input and sends to server. The server changes it to upper case and returns to client and client prints it on console. How to model this exact situation in ns3 ? I could not get any solution even after searching for a lot of time and I am not getting any way of actually interacting with the user in ns3.

Your question is very general and cannot be answered in a few lines. You can find the ns3 repository here LoRaWAN ns-3 module. It contains end devices, a gateway, and a server. A server is responsible for interacting with end devices in many ways. For example, the network server can control the end device's data rate, transmit power, and bandwidth. It also notifies end devices with downlink acknowledgment through a gateway. Based on my opinion, this module can be helpful for your mentioned scenario. If you do not want to violate the tcp/ip protocol stack you should modify the MAC commands used in this module to fulfill your needs.

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How to acces the data from a website 50-100 times a second using raspberry Pi?

I want to fetch the data of a stock. Since the data changes very fast, is there any way to pull the data like 50-100 times a second from trading websites?
And can we implement that using a raspberry Pi 4 8gig model.
RasPi4 should be more than adequate for this task. Both the ethernet and WiFi hardware is capable of connections at these speeds. (Unless you’re running a bunch of other stuff on it.) Consider where your bottlenecks may be, likely ISP or other network traffic). Consider avoiding WiFi in favor of cat5e or cat6. Consider hanging this device off your router (edge) to keep lan traffic lower and consider QOS settings if you think this traffic may compete with other lan traffic.
This appears to be a general question with no specific platform in mind. For stocks, there are lots of platforms to choose from.
APIs for trading platforms often include a method to open a stream. Instead of a full TCP conversation for each price check, a stream tells the server to just keep on sending data. There are timeout mechanisms of course, but it is good to close that stream gracefully (It’s polite since you’re consuming server resources at a different scale. I’ve seen some financial APIs monitor and throttle stream subscribers who leave sessions open.).
For some APIs/languages you can find solid classes already built on GitHub. Although, if simply pulling and reading a stream then the platform API doc code snippets should be enough to get you going.
Be sure to find out what other overhead may be implicated. For example, if an account or API key is needed to open a stream then either a session must be opened first or the creds must be passed with the stream being opened. The API docs will say. If you’re new to this sort of thing, just be a detective and try to infer what is needed. API docs usually try to be precise and technically correct with the absolute minimum word count.
Simply checking the steam should be easy. Depending on how that steam can be handled by your code/script, it may be harder to perform logic on the stream while it is being updated. That’s usually a thread issue or a variable scope issue depending on the script/code. For what you’re doing I would consider Python or PowerShell depending on your skill-set and other design parameters.

Network design: one-to-many high bandwidth transmissions that excludes users

If StackOverflow is the wrong Exchange for this question, please help direct me to the correct one.
Short Version
What is the best design for a networking application in which one user transmits a constant, high-bandwidth stream of data to many other addresses? The solution must not require the uploader to duplicate the packets for each recipient and preferably will not transmit to users that have not been accepted by the transmitter.
Long Version
A friend and I have written an application that enables someone to transmit data in real time to one or more recipients that he wants to receive the data. I have designed the high-level application protocol to use UDP and to encode the data so that each packet can be lost without hurting the use of the rest. This solution requires managing sockets with each user and sending each packet to every user.
The problem here is that the stream can be very high bandwidth. The user can modify the settings for how high quality the data he is sending should be, and can end up sending 6 Mbps to each user. It is unfeasible to expect a user to pay his ISP enough to be allowed to upload such a stream to the preferred minimum of four other users at a time.
We need a way for the transmitter to send a packet exactly once and have each user receive a copy.
We have looked at multicasting. It may be what we need to use in the end, but we are concerned about the fact that anyone can join any group. It would be preferable to not allow users we do not want to see the data to not be allowed to join in. There is also the problem that if multiple transmitters happen to use the same group, viewers may find that they are receiving multiple streams' worth of data when they only want one.
My searching has revealed something IBM published over a decade ago called Explicit Multicast (Xcast) that looks perfect, but I have yet to find any information to determine whether this technology is commonly supported. Also, I have not yet seen whether it supports datagrams.
Does anyone know the best way to design an application that meets our needs?
Please keep in mind that we have no funds to support our project. Solutions need to be free.
Edit
In the summary above, I hinted at but failed to explicitly state that this is for a real-time application. The motivating drive behind the application is to keep the clients/recipients as close together in time as is possible. If packets are lost or arrive too late to be used in keeping the server and clients in phase, they need to be disregarded. That is why I designed the application protocol on top of UDP with independent data in each packet. Even if a client receives only one packet out of 300 for a given time step, it will use what it did get.
I think that I_am_Helpful's recommendation may be a good step in the right direction (or possibly the destination). I need to do some experimentation to determine whether using a system like Spread will work. However, I do not think I can budget more than additional 17 ms in transmission time.
If you can think of a system that enables sending unreliable datagrams to a specific group of users (like Spread) for a real-time application (unlike Spread, see p. 3), please let me know about it.
We need a way for the transmitter to send a packet exactly once and
have each user receive a copy.
In my limited knowledge, I would say that Reliable Multicasting appears to be one of the viable option for broadcasting in the group. I would like to mention that there are some of the possible Java API's* which could help you achieving the same :
JGroups Java API
The Spread Toolkit -> Spread consists of a library that user applications are linked with, a binary daemon which runs on each computer that is part of the processor group, and various utility and demonstration programs.
Appia
*NOTE : I have never worked with these API's.
It would be preferable to not allow users we do not want to see the
data to not be allowed to join in.
They do provide this feature, e.g., Spread supports thousands of groups with different sets of members. It also provides a range of reliability, ordering and stability guarantees for messages. JGroups can be used to create groups of processes whose members can send messages to each other. It also has facilities like group creation and deletion(Group members can be spread across LANs or WANs).
There is also the problem that if multiple transmitters happen to use
the same group, viewers may find that they are receiving multiple
streams' worth of data when they only want one.
When you could easily create multiple groups in the same network(using Spread,etc.), then, I believe that would no longer be an issue. It is your responsibility to declassify users into different groups.
I hope the given information helps. Good LUCK.
Via multicast you achieve exactly you want: sending each packet once, but authentication seems to be a concern for you.
One possible solution could be simetric cryptography, where the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt. Via TCP your clients connect to a server and fetch the multicast IP Address of the transmission and its associated key, then they join the multicast group and decrypt the incomming transmission.
If you accept a more flexible solution, you could have a server which sends a transmission in real time to a set of distributed servers. Your clients connect to one of these distributed servers via unicast, and after authentication is done, they are inluded in a list of receivers. Each distributed server sends each new transmission packet to each registered client via UDP. in ordinary situations your clients would have the same experience as if it was delivered in a multicast group, but the servers will spend far more bandwidth. Multiple transmission at a time will be allowed, so it could be good for you, and you can have more control, as clients can send signals to the servers, like PAUSE, and etc.

bind zmq dealer to multiple repliers

I want to create a proxy server which routes incoming packets from REQ type sockets to one of the REP sockets on one of the computers in a cluster. I have been reading the guide and I think the proper structure is a combination of ROUTER and DEALER on the proxy server. Where the ROUTER passes messages to the dealer to be distributed. However, I cannot figure out how to create this connection scheme. Is this the correct architecture? If so how to I bind a dealer to multiple addresses. The flow I envision is like this REQ->ROUTER|DEALER->[REP, REP, ...] where only one REP socket would handle a single request.
NB: forget about packets -- think in terms of "Behaviour", that's the key
ZeroMQ is rather an abstract layer for certain communication-behavioral patterns, so while terms alike socket do sound similar to what one has read/used previously, the ZeroMQ-world is by far different from many points of view.
This very formalism allows ZeroMQ Formal-Communication-Patterns to grow in scale, to get assembled in higher-order-patterns ( for load-balancing, for fault-tolerance, for performance-scaling ). Mastering this style of thinkign, you forget about packets, thread-sync-issues, I/O-polling and focus on your higher-abstraction-based design -- on Behaviour -- rather than on underlying details. This makes your design both free from re-inventing wheel & very powerful, as you re-use a highly professional tools right for your problem-domain tasks.
DEALER->[REP,REP,...] Segment
That said, your DEALER-node ( in fact a ZMQsocket-access-node, having The Behaviour called a "DEALER" to resemble it's queue/buffering-style, it's round-robin dispatcher, it's send-out&expect-answer-in model ) may .bind() to multiple localhost address:port-s and these "service-points" may also operate over different TransportClass-es -- one working over tcp://, another over inproc://, if that makes sense for your Design Architecture -- ZeroMQ empowers you to use this transparently abstracted from all the "awfull&dangerous" lower level gritty-nitties.
ZeroMQ also allows to reverse .connect() / .bind()
In principle, where helpfull, one may reverse the .bind() and .connect() from DEALER to a known target address of the respective REP entity.
You leave a couple details out that are important to determining the correct architecture.
When you say "from REQ type sockets to one of the REP sockets on one of the computers in a cluster", how do you determine which computer gets the message? Is it addressed to a specific computer? Does a computer announce its availability before it can receive a message? Does each message just get passed to the next one in line in a round-robin fashion? (if it's not the last one, you probably don't want a DEALER socket)
When you say "how do I bind a dealer to multiple addresses", it's not clear what you mean by "addresses"... Do you mean to say that the proxy has a unique IP address that it uses to communicate with each computer in the cluster? Or are you just wondering how to manage the connection to multiple different peers with the same socket? The former is a special case, the latter is simple.
I'm going to work with the following assumptions:
You want a worker computer from the cluster to announce its availability for work before it receives any work, and any computer in the cluster can handle any job. A faster worker, or a worker working on a smaller job, will not have to wait behind some slow worker to finish their job and get a new job first.
The proxy/broker uses a single ip interface to communicate with all workers.
If those are true, then what you want will be closer to this:
REQ->ROUTER|ROUTER->[REQ, REQ, ...]
A worker will create a request to the backend router socket to announce its availability, and await a reply with work. Once it is finished, it will create a new request with the finished work, which again announces its availability. The other half of the pattern you've already worked out.
This is the Simple Pirate Pattern from the ZMQ guide. It's a good place to start, but it's not very robust. This is in the Reliable Request-Reply Patterns section of the guide, and I suggest you read or reread that section carefully as it will guide you well. In particular, they keep refining this pattern into more and more reliable implementations and wind up with the Majordomo pattern, which is very robust and fault tolerant. You should see if you need all the features that provides or if you can scale it back a little. Either way, you should learn and understand what these patterns are doing and why before you make the choice to do something different.

How to retain one million simultaneous TCP connections?

I am to design a server that needs to serve millions of clients that are simultaneously connected with the server via TCP.
The data traffic between the server and the clients will be sparse, so bandwidth issues can be ignored.
One important requirement is that whenever the server needs to send data to any client it should use the existing TCP connection instead of opening a new connection toward the client (because the client may be behind a firewall).
Does anybody know how to do this, and what hardware/software is needed (at the least cost)?
What operating systems are you considering for this?
If using a Windows OS and using something later than Vista then you shouldn't have a problem with many thousands of connections on a single machine. I've run tests (here: http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2005/11/windows-tcpip-server-performance.html) with a low spec Windows Server 2003 machine and easily achieved more than 70,000 active TCP connections. Some of the resource limits that affect the number of connections possible have been lifted considerably on Vista (see here: http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2005/11/windows-tcpip-server-performance.html) and so you could probably achieve your goal with a small cluster of machines. I don't know what you'd need in front of those to route the connections.
Windows provides a facility called I/O Completion Ports (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302334.aspx) which allow you to service many thousands of concurrent connections with very few threads (I was running tests yesterday with 5000 connections saturating a link to a server with 2 threads to process the I/O...). Thus the basic architecture is very scalable.
If you want to run some tests then I have some freely available tools on my blog that allow you to thrash a simple echo server using many thousands of connections (1) and (2) and some free code which you could use to get you started (3)
The second part of your question, from your comments, is more tricky. If the client's IP address keeps changing and there's nothing between you and them that is providing NAT to give you a consistent IP address then their connections will, no doubt, be terminated and need to be re-established. If the clients detect this connection tear down when their IP address changes then they can reconnect to the server, if they can't then I would suggest that the clients need to poll the server every so often so that they can detect the connection loss and reconnect. There's nothing the server can do here as it can't predict the new IP address and it will discover that the old connection has failed when it tries to send data.
And remember, your problems are only just beginning once you get your system to scale to this level...
This problem is related to the so-called C10K problem. The C10K page lists a large number of good resources for addressing the problems you will encounter when you try to allow thousands of clients to connect to the same server.
I've come across the APE Project
a while back. It seems like a dream come true. They can support up to 100k concurrent clients on a single node. Spread them across 10 or 20 nodes, and you can serve millions. Perfect for RESTful applications. Might want to look deeper for any shared namespace. One drawback is that this is a standalone server, as in supplementary to a web server. This server is of course Open Source, so any cost is hardware/ISP related.
You cannot use UDP. If the client sends a request and you don't reply immediately, a router is going to forget the reverse route in 30 seconds or less, so your server will never be able to reply to the client.
TCP is the only option, and it, too, will give you headaches. Most routers are going to forget the route and/or drop the connection after a few minutes, so your client/server code is going to have to send "keep alives" fairly often.
I recommend setting up a "sniffer", to see how the phone companies are staying in touch with your smartphone for their "push" technology. Copy whatever they're doing, because that stuff works!
As Greg mentioned, the problem you are describing is C10K (or rather "C1M" in your case )
I recently made a simple TCP echo server on linux that scales very well with the number of sessions (only tested up to 200.000 though), by using the epoll queue. On BSD, you have something similar called kqueue.
You can check out the code if you want to. Hope this helps and good luck!
EDIT: As noted in the comments below, my original assertion that there is a 64K limit based on the number of ports is incorrect, however there is a 32K limit on the number of socket handles, so my suggested design is valid.
With a typical TCP/IP server design, you're limited in the number of simultaneous open connections you can have. The server has one listening port, and when a client connects to it the server makes an accept call, and that creates a new socket on a random port for the rest of the connection.
To handle more than 64K simultaneous connections I think you need to use UDP instead. You only need one port for the server to listen on, and you need to manage the connections using a 32-bit client ID in the packet data instead of having a separate port for each client. The 32-bit client ID could be the client's IP address, and the client can listen on a known UDP port for messages coming back from the server. That port would be the only one that needs to be open on the firewall.
With this approach, your only limitation is how quickly you can handle and respond to UDP messages. With millions of clients, even sparse traffic could give you large spikes, and if you don't read the packets fast enough your input queue will fill up and you'll start dropping packets. The C10K page Greg points to will give you strategies for that.

Design for wire between server and access point and RF to endpoint device

We're about to design an inhouse industry network consisting basically of the following: 1 server connected via wire to up to 100 proprietary RF access points (basically embedded devices), which each can be connected via radio to up to 100 endpoint embedded devices. Something like this:
Now, I'm wondering about some design decisions that we need to take and I'm sure there are plenty of similar designs out there and lots of folks with experiences of them, both good and bad. Maybe you can chime in?
All endpoint devices are independent and will communicate their own unique data to the server, and the other way around. The server therefore needs to be able to target each endpoint device individually. Each endpoint device pairs itself with 1 access point and then talks a proprietary RF protocol to it, TCP/IP is not an option there.
The server will know which endpoint device is paired with which access point, so when the server needs to talk to an individual endpoint device, the communication must go through the paired access point. Hence, the server needs to directly address the access point.
Question: Considering the limited resources available in the proprietary access point, is TCP/IP between server and access point recommended for this scenario? Or would you suggest something entirely different?
I find the diagram confusing:
If this isn't its own network and the server to AP link is running on your internal company network, there isn't really an option, there must be a TCP/IP stack on the AP.
If this is its own isolated network then what is the router for?
If this is, in fact, its own isolated network then you are right, there really isn't a need for the Ethernet connectivity at all. The overhead you will see on the wireless is huge, your no overhead ideal data rate is 250kbit/sec, running ZigBee on 802.15.4 # 2.4ghz point to point your real data throughout is usually around 20kbit/sec. A custom protocol should be able to obtain lower overhead but this would need to be defined.
If I were designing this I would choose a SoC for the AP that had on board 802.15.4 and CAN (Controller Area Network). Depending on size and data rate just get a PCI CAN card for the server and connect it up, use something like DeviceNet as your protocol layer for server to AP communications. This can be expanded by using CAN switches and repeaters. CAN is used all the time in industrial automation, a little googling can find you example of tens of thousands of nodes used in some manufacturing plants.
There are small TCP/IP stacks, for example LwIP.
You didn't mention the amount of data to be communicated, or bandwidth considerations?
A 3rd party TCPIP stack targeted at the 8051 would simplify all the networking issues with connecting 100 units. You probably will still end up with a proprietary protocol that sits on top of the tcpip stack but then it is just simple point-to-point communication between the server and each end point.

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