Experiment description

A single sender broadcast (ethernet broadcast) a 512B packet to 238 receivers running tcpdump. The wired interface eth1 was used on all senders and receivers. The number of packets sent and the time between two consecutive packets was varied at the sender.

Results

Metrics chosen were

• the number of packets successfully received,
• the percentage of missing packets and
• the time taken to receive all packets

on each receiving node.

Experiment 1

10000 packets were sent with an interval of 10ms between consecutive packets. The following figure shows the number of packets lost per receiver. From the figure, all receivers except for one (node14-3) receives all 10000 packets. The same behavior was exhibited in another run of the same experiment. This seems to indicate that there might be something wrong with node14-3.

Design Notes for nodehandler

Underlying model

• nodehandler broadcasts each command to all the nodes using a C program

System Parameters

• Underlying traffic model: Figure out
  • how many packets
  • of what size
  • and with what interarrival are generated by a "typical" experiment script

• For this traffic model, test the performance in terms of packet loss, and avg. latency

Building reliability into the protocol

Some thoughts on building reliability into the protocol

1. Cumulative ACK by nodeagent every 5 packets
2. Stagger sending of ACK's to reduce the collision domains based on

    N* backoff interval, where N = row no. 
   

3. nodehandler separate thread maintains a bitmap for all packets and fills a "one" for every missing packet reported by the nodeagent
4. nodehandler broadcasts these missing packets after a timeout
5. This timeout is based on the time taken by all nodes to send an ACK to the nodehandler using the convention of Step 2

Fetching OML xml schema

• Replace existing ruby webserver with proper Apache to serve xml files
• nodeagents still use wget to fetch these