IN4230 Fall 2023

Home Exam 2: Routing

Formally

This assignment will count towards your final grade and must be solved individually.
Your submission will be marked with respect to how well you have fulfilled the requirements listed in the "Task" section.

Task

In home exam 2 we will extend the network stack we started building in home exam 1. The primary task in this assignment is to finish the MIP network layer by implementing routing and forwarding facilities.

We will continue using mininet to emulate the link layer network, this time with a larger topology (see the handouts section below).

You will need to extend the MIP daemon you started to implement in the mandatory assignment and write a routing daemon which will handle running the routing protocol and maintaining a routing table.

Again, you will need to write a brief design document documenting your design choices and implementation. You will also need to answer a few theoretical questions.

MIP daemon extensions

As before, the MIP daemon implements the network layer functionality in our network stack. You will need to complete it with routing and forwarding features, which will enable communication between MIP nodes which are connected indirectly, through intermediate systems (other MIP nodes).

Additional MIP daemon components

The components you developed in home exam 1 should not require significant modifications.

You will need to extend your implementation with two additional components:

• An interface with a routing daemon, which runs the actual routing protocol and maintains the node's routing table.
  One necessary change to the existing higher-layer interface is that it needs to be possible to specify the TTL of outgoing messages.
• A forwarding engine, which is able to relay MIP datagrams intended for other reachable hosts by querying the routing daemon for an outgoing path.

When combined with the components from home exam 1, these components should result in a fully featured, albeit simple, network layer. It should be possible to communicate with MIP hosts located any number of hops away.

Implementation details

As in home exam 1, the MIP daemon listens on a RAW socket to interface with the link layer and on a UNIX domain socket to interface with higher layers.

The protocol for communicating with upper layers is amended as follows (changes highlighted in bold):

• Whenever there is an SDU to be passed either up or down, this is sent as a message over the UNIX socket.
• The message format consists of: An 8 bit MIP address, which is either the sender or destination address when passing up/down, respectively. An 8 bit TTL value specifying the time to live of the message. A value of 0 (zero) indicates that the MIP daemon should use a default value. The rest of the message contains the payload (SDU).
• In this assignment, it is possible to use blocking socket calls when dealing with this interface socket as long as one takes care to use a mechanism such as epoll to avoid deadlocking between sending and reading calls. Alternatively, one may use non-blocking sockets. We will need to support multiple upper layer processes (applications and the routing daemon).
• The UNIX domain socket must use the SOCK_SEQPACKET socket type. This provides connection-oriented datagram semantics over the socket.
  See unix(7).
• The MIP daemon listens on the UNIX socket, upper layer entities connect to it. Upon initially connecting, the upper layer entity identifies itself with a single message containing the SDU type identifier it handles (8 bits, but recall that values are restricted to the range [0,7]).

The forwarding engine simply checks the TTL and destination address of incoming MIP datagrams and decides how to handle them:

1. If the destination address is that of the local host, pass the SDU to the appropriate higher layer entity based on the SDU type.
   No further processing.
2. When the destination address is not local, the forwarding routine continues:
3. The TTL value is decremented by one. Should the new value be zero, the datagram must be discarded without further processing.
4. If the routing daemon is able to return a route to the destination host from its routing table, forward the PDU to the returned next hop. The updated TTL value must be set in the PDU header.
   If no route is found, discard the datagram.

The forwarding engine must not block the execution flow in the MIP daemon while waiting for route lookup responses. This entails that it must, for example, be possible to send an outgoing MIP broadcast datagram at the same time as the routing lookup is in progress.

Routing daemon

The routing daemon performs two functions: running the routing protocol and answering route queries.

Routing protocol

The routing protocol allows each host in a MIP network to discover other nodes in the network and build a routing table containing routes for reaching other nodes.

No configuration or other static information shall be necessary to start the routing process. The protocol is to be completely dynamic.

You will implement the Distance Vector Routing (DVR) scheme, with Poisoned Reverse loop protection.

Routing protocol implementation details

The exact specification and implementation of the DVR protocol is up to you. You must take care to adequately document it in your design document. It is important that you specify both how the routing process runs and the message formats.

The routing daemon interfaces with the MIP daemon just like any other upper layer entity (see above).

The SDU type of the routing protocol is 0x04.

You will need at least the following message types:

• A HELLO message for discovering neighbouring nodes.
• An UPDATE message to advertise the routes in your routing table.
• A REQUEST message for intra-host route lookups. This message is fully specified in the next section.
• A RESPONSE message for intra-host route responses. This message is fully specified in the next section.

Routing lookup implementation details

The message format of the REQUEST message, used for routing queries (from the MIP daemon to the routing daemon) is as follows:

  <MIP address of the host itself (8 bits)> <zero (0) TTL (8 bits)> <R (0x52, 8 bits)> <E (0x45, 8 bits)> <Q (0x51, 8 bits)> <MIP address to look up (8 bits)>

The routing daemon must answer queries strictly in the order they are received, with a RESPONSE message with the following format:

  <MIP address of the host itself (8 bits)> <zero (0) TTL (8 bits)> <R (0x52, 8 bits)> <S (0x53, 8 bits)> <P (0x50, 8 bits)> <next hop MIP address (8 bits)>

To indicate a lookup failure (no known route to the requested host), the routing daemon will respond with a next hop address of 255.

Ping applications

The only change which should be necessary in the application code from home exam 1 is conforming to the updated interface between the MIP daemon and higher layers described above.

Handouts

You shall test your solution using the h2 mininet topology configuration as defined here.

It must be possible to perform ping measurements between MIP address 10 and MIP address 50.

Development and test environment

You will develop and test your implementation on a virtual machine image that we provide. The virtual machine will be hosted on the NREC cloud infrastructure, for detailed information and instructions on using the virtual machine platform, see here.

Please do not attempt to solve the assignment locally on your own machine or in any way which deviates from these instructions.

Submission materials

You must submit the following:

1. A design document that contains:
   • A cover page bearing your candidate number, the title of the document, the course code and the semester. You must not indicate your name or username anywhere in your submission!
   • A flow chart summarizing the flow of execution of the updated MIP daemon as well as the routing daemon.
   • A concise specification of the routing protocol you have devised. Include descriptions of both the behaviour and message formats.
   • Detailed answers to the following questions:
     • Describe the "Count-to-Infinity" problem in DVR protocols. How do you handle this problem in your own implementation?
     • What is the limitation of Split Horizon? How does Poison reverse solve this issue?
2. Program code, where the code is well commented. Document all the variables and definitions. For each function in the program, you must document the following: Example comment:

         /**
         * Convert string to all-uppercase
         * str: pointer to input string.
         * dest: pointer to output buffer.
         * The buffer pointed at by dest must be allocated
         * and large enough to hold all of str.
         *
         * Returns the number of characters changed.
         */
         int to_upper(char *str, char **dest)
         { ...

   • What the function does.
   • What input and output parameters mean and how they are used.
   • Which global variables affect the function.
   • What the function returns.
   • Other characteristics that are important to know about (e.g. error situations).

Submission requirements

The design document edited using an appropriate tool, eg. LaTeX, Word, etc. The document should contain the items listed above.

Before delivery, the document shall be converted to PDF format. Neither a Word / Works / Open Office / TeX - document nor a regular editor file (plain text) will be accepted.

The code must consist of compilable C source files. We highly recommend including a Makefile for easy compilation.

Your solution must compile and run on the provided virtual machine image, without requiring additional configuration.

The scope of the design document need not necessarily be large, but must contain sufficient information to meet the requirements described under 'submission materials'. The important thing is to document understanding of the relevant topics, in addition to the actual implementation.

Electronic submission

All materials must be submitted electronically where all files (Makefile, readme.pdf, main *.c files, and any possible subdirectories for headers or utility functions) are collected in one main directory using your candidate number as a filename. Create one compressed tar-ball containing that directory. Use the command:

  tar -zcv --owner=nobody --group=nobody -f candidate_no.tgz candidate_no

Please note that Inspera has issues with filenames containing more than a single period ("."), avoid naming your file in such a way.

Exams at UiO are anonymously graded. It is your responsibility to ensure that no part of your submission contains any identifying information such as your name, username and so on.

Your exam solution must be submitted through the Inspera exam system.

We recommend that you confirm that the archive you uploaded contains what it should by downloading it and unpacking it again after submission. If you deliver the wrong files, there is nothing we can do about it when we process your delivery. We also recommend you upload draft versions as you work, to ensure you have a deliverable in the system should you experience last minute technical difficulties etc.

Deadline

The deadline for submitting this exam is Monday November 20 2023 at 23:59 Oslo local time.

This is an absolute deadline, failure to deliver on time will result in the grade F for this part-exam.

The course management is not able to handle any enquiries regarding medical extensions and so forth, you must contact the study administration directly.

You are expected to strictly comply with the rules governing studies and exams at the University of Oslo.