PEP-DNA

PEP-DNA: a Performance Enhancing Proxy for Deploying Network Architectures
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Introduction

PEP-DNA is a Performance Enhancing Proxy designed specifically for Deploying new Network Architectures. It is implemented in the Linux kernel and can be installed wherever a translation needs to occur between a new architecture and TCP/IP domains. PEP-DNA is currently able to interconnect a TCP connection with (i) another TCP connection, (ii) the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (Visit http://pouzinsociety.org to read more about RINA), and (iii) a Content-Centric Networking domain (https://named-data.net/publications/van-ccn-bremen-description/). This README.md file provides information on repeating and replicating the results of the PEP-DNA paper published. For more information on how to use PEP-DNA in different scenarios, check the Tutorials on the Wiki pages.

Build instructions

We have tested PEP-DNA with the current stable distribution of Ubuntu and Debian, with kernel versions between 4.1.x to 5.4.x. In order to run all the experiments described in the paper, PEP-DNA needs to be built with RINA and CCN support. We use the RINA stack, which is available at https://github.com/IRATI/stack, and CCN-lite, which can be found at https://github.com/cn-uofbasel/ccn-lite, to build RINA and CCN network. To facilitate the installation process, we include the RINA stack and CCN-lite in this repository.

Note that a user with sudo privileges is required to load PEP-DNA and RINA kernel modules apply other commands.

Prerequisites

First, install the user-space dependencies which are required to build RINA.

sh sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config git g++ libssl-dev libelf-dev protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev socat python python3 openjdk-8-jre openjdk-8-jdk linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Next, use the following to install the requirements for CCN-lite:

sh sudo apt-get install cmake libssl-dev pkg-config libssl-dev libcmocka-dev doxygen

Install libnl-3-dev for Netlink sockets support.

sh sudo apt-get install libnl-3-dev

Additional tools are required to configure Linux hosts, run the experiments and collect information.

sh sudo apt-get install sysstat ethtool cpufrequtils httping httperf apache2

Installation

1. Clone the repository (We recommend to clone the repo in the home directory so that it matches the path used in the scripts.)

sh cd ~ git clone https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna.git

1. Build and install RINA's kernel-space and user-space software

sh cd ~/pep-dna/rina-stack sudo ./configure sudo -E make install

1. Build CCN-lite

- Set environment variable `$CCNL_HOME` and add the binary folder of CCN-lite to your `$PATH`:
  ```sh
    cd ~/pep-dna/ccn-lite
    export CCNL_HOME="`pwd`"
    export PATH=$PATH:"$CCNL_HOME/bin"
  ```
To make these variables permanent, add them to your shell's `.rc` file, e.g. `~/.bashrc`.

- Build CCN-lite using `cmake`:
  ```sh
    cd $CCNL_HOME
    mkdir build && cd build
    cmake ..
    make
  ```

1. Configure and install PEP-DNA

sh cd ~/pep-dna/pepdna ./configure --with-rina --with-ccn --with-local-receiver make all sudo -E make install

To configure PEP-DNA with RINA support or CCN suport --with-rina or --with-ccn flags needs to be used. Use --with-debug to build PEP-DNA with DEBUG flag. Note that building in debug mode will reduce the performance of the proxy and print detailed logging in the /var/log/kern.log file. When PEP-DNA runs at the same host as the receiver, a.k.a the TCP server, it needs to be configured with ---with-local-receiver flag in order to enable full transpacency at this case. Configure the proxy using --with-local-sender if PEP-DNA is running at the same host as the sender, a.k.a TCP client. More details about the building process can be found at the Wiki section. For our experiments, the commands above are sufficient.

All the testing applications and scripts used to run the experiments, collect the results and plot the graphs are located in https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna/tree/main/pepdna/utils/apps.
Run the following commands to install them to /usr/bin/.

sh cd ~/pep-dna/pepdna/utils/apps make all sudo -E make install

Publications

• 29th International Conference on Network Protocols (IEEE ICNP 2021)
  • Paper: [https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna/raw/main/pepdna/papers/icnp-nipaa21.pdf]
  • The talk in the NIPAA'21 Workshop: [https://youtu.be/Yve_HPlU4hc?t=8615]
  • DOI: [https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP52444.2021.9651953]
• 12th International Conference on Network of the Future (NoF 2021)
  • Demo Paper: [https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna/raw/main/pepdna/papers/demo-nof211.pdf]
  • DOI: [https://doi.org/10.1109/NoF52522.2021.9609870]
• Technical Report
  • Extended paper: [http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-91886]

Reproducibility

We aim to make our work entirely reproducible and encourage interested researchers to test the code and replicate the reported experimental results. The PEP-DNA implementation and documentation needed to reproduce all the experiments described in the paper are available in this public repository. The tools we developed to the run the experiments were installed at Step 4 of the previous section. The scripts for automated testing, analysis and plotting of the generated data are located at https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna/tree/main/pepdna/utils/scripts/ alongside with a detailed README_scripts.md file. Read the README_scripts.md file for a detailed explanation on how to set the variables for your own testbed environment, run all the experiments and plot the generated dataset.

For more step-by-step examples on how to use PEP-DNA in different scenarios, please refer to the Wiki pages.

Contributing

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to be learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

1. Fork the Project
2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/udp-support)
3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Added UDP support')
4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/udp-support)
5. Open a Pull Request

License

Distributed under the GPL License. See LICENSE in https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna/tree/main/pepdna/ for more information.

Contact

Kristjon Ciko - kristjoc@ifi.uio.no

Project Link: https://github.com/kr1stj0n/pep-dna

Acknowledgements

• RINA implementation for OS/Linux
• CCN-lite: a lightweight implementation of the CCNx protocol and its variations