Lab 1

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Final Project

TCP/IP Flow Identification

Due: 11/04/03 in class
Lab 1 instructions
Lab 1 code

The goal of this assignment is to program a TCP/IP flow identification algorithm. The program should read a trace of packets and tell the following statistics at the end of the run:

bulletNumber of flows observed. That is the number of unique 5-tuples consisting of IP source and destination, layer 4 protocol number, and source and destination ports.
bulletNumber of properly terminated TCP flows.
bulletMaximum number of active flows at any given point.
bullet5-tuple of flow with most data transferred.

For handling packets, we use the PacketBench environment (see Ramaswamy, R., Wolf, T.: "PacketBench: A Tool for Workload Characterization of Network Processing," in Proc. of 6th IEEE Annual Workshop on Workload Characterization (WWC-6), Austin, TX, October 2003.). PacketBench provides a simple interface for handling packets that does not require any understanding on how to process packet trace files.

The lab can be implemented on any UNIX, Linux, or Cygwin system (e.g., your ECS account). The detailed instructions are as follows:

  1. Download the lab code and data from here and save the file into a new directory.
  2. Extract the files:
    gunzip ece697j-lab1.tar.gz
    tar xvf ece697j-lab1.tar
    This should give you a number of files including two trace files (AIX-1058228090-1.tsh AND OSU-1058584197.tsh (10MB!)).
  3. Compile all files by running: make
  4. Edit the Makefile if necessary. The VERBOSE switch can be toggled by
    uncommenting/commenting "-DVERBOSE". To recompile run:
    make clean
    make
  5. To run PacketBench, use the command line syntax as follows :
    bench -N {tracefile name} {dump file} {drop file}
    Example :
    ./bench -N ./AIX-1058228090-1.tsh dump.raw drop.raw
    Dump file is the file in which packets get written to after normal processing.
    Drop file is the file in which packets which don't get processed (i.e. packets
    that are dropped) are written to.
    The output should look like:

    bench.c:291(main),Processing packet...
    Packet handler received IP packet
    bench.c:33(write_packet_to_tsh_file),Writing packet to dump file
    bench.c:277(main), Warning : TSH trace file used. Packet payload is invalid
    [...]
    bench.c:291(main),Processing packet...
    Packet handler received IP packet
    bench.c:33(write_packet_to_tsh_file),Writing packet to dump file

    Total packets processed : 1981
    Packets dumped : 1981
    Packets dropped : 0

    Note that the warnings are ok (due to the nature of the trace files that we use).
  6. The packet handling code is in the file flowid.c. Your code should go into flowid.c and flowid.h in the appropriate, marked places. At present, the packet handling code simply prints a confirmation message when it receives a packet.
  7. Two trace files are provided. Both are in binary time sequenced header (TSH) format (44 bytes per packet).
    bulletAIX-1058228090-1.tsh ~ 2,000 packets
    bulletOSU-1058584197.tsh ~ 248,000 packets
  8. There is a hash function provided in the flowid.c file that might come in handy.

You should turn in a brief (around 2-4 pages) report that contains the following:

bulletA diagram showing the fields of and IP and a TCP header.
bulletA diagram of a TCP state machine that you use to determine the state of a connections.
bulletThe results from your measurement (see above) for both sample traces.
bulletA printout from your flowid.c and flowid.h file (does not count towards page count).

 There will be a help session on 10/28/03.

©2003 by Tilman Wolf