pathChirp Software

[ General info | People | Papers&Presentations | Code | Ns Simulator code ]

pathChirp



pathChirp is a new active probing tool for estimating the available bandwidth on a communication network path. Based on the concept of "self-induced congestion," pathChirp features an exponential flight pattern of probes we call a chirp. Packet chirps offer several significant advantages over current probing schemes based on packet pairs or packet trains. By rapidly increasing the probing rate within each chirp, pathChirp obtains a rich set of information from which to dynamically estimate the available bandwidth. Another of our tools, STAB, is based on pathChirp and locates available bandwidth bottlenecks.

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People

Faculty:
Richard Baraniuk, Rudolf Riedi

Students:
Vinay Ribeiro , Ryan King, Niels Hoven

Collaborators:
Les Cottrell , Jiri Navratil (SLAC)

Acknowledgements:
Allen McIntosh (Telcordia), Margaret Murray (CAIDA)

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Papers & Presentations

Paper
Vinay Ribeiro, Rudolf Riedi, Richard Baraniuk, Jiri Navratil, and Les Cottrell
pathChirp: Efficient Available Bandwidth Estimation for Network Paths, Passive and Active Measurement Workshop 2003
PowerPoint Presentation
pathChirp: Efficient Available Bandwidth Estimation for Network Paths, Passive and Active Measurement Workshop 2003

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Code

Implementation requires UNIX
Download either Gzip Compressed File(59KB) or Uncompressed File (245KB)
Steps to unpack file. All UNIX commands are in bold face. The outputs of certain commands are system dependent and are be denoted by square brackets [***].
- If you downloaded the Gzip Compressed File
  gunzip ./pathchirp-2.3.7.tar.gz
  tar -xvf ./pathchirp-2.3.7.tar
- If you downloaded the Uncompressed File
  tar -xvf ./pathchirp-2.3.7.tar
  Start by reading the README file in the newly created subdirectory pathchirp-2.3.7 or follow the instructions below.
Compiling code.
- cd ./pathchirp-2.3.7
- ./configure
- make
Running the code.
- cd ./Bin
- ls ./
  Let us call the result of this command [subdir]. Examples of [subdir] could be i686, i386, sparc and so on.
- cd [subdir]
  All the above commands must be run on both the machine that will send out chirp packets and the machine that will receive the chirp packets.
- On the machine sending out chirp packets run
  ./pathchirp_snd
- On the sender machine receiving chirp packets run
  ./pathchirp_rcv -S [sender machine name or IP address] -t 300
- At the receiver you will observe the output
  Opening file: [resultsfilename]
- After 300 seconds (5 minutes) the experiment would have ended. The results will be in the file [resultsfilename] at the receiver in the format
  [timestamp] [Available bandwidth estimate in Mega bits/sec]
- To view the results run the following at the receiver machine
  more [resultsfilename]
- To rerun the experiment you only need to restart the ./pathchirp_rcv program at the receiver machine.

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Ns Simulator code

You should already have the ns-2 simulator installed. You can obtain ns-2 code here. In the following NS-2-DIR refers to your ns-2.* directory (example: ns-2.27)
Save current files: Before untarring the code below, save a few ns files that will be overwritten so that you can revert to the original easily. 1) cd NS-2-DIR
2) tar -cvf original.tar Makefile.in FILES tcl/lib/ns-default.tcl tcl/lib/ns-packet.tcl common/packet.h

In case you need to revert to the original code:

1) cd NS-2-DIR
2) tar -xvf original.tar
3) make clean
4) ./configure
5) make depend
6) make
Download Code: pathchirp_ns_2.27.tar (for ns_2.27), pathchirp_ns_2.26.tar (for ns_2.26)

To add the pathChirp code to ns-2, copy the pathChirp_ns_2.27.tar (or pathChirp_ns_2.26.tar) file to NS-2-DIR and run the following commands.

1) cd NS-2-DIR
2) tar -xvf pathchirp_ns_2.*tar

If you have not already saved your current files, go to the "Save current files" instructions above. Otherwise follow the instructions in the README_PATHCHIRP file OR proceed as follows.

3) tar -xvf pathchirp_code.tar
4) make clean
5) ./configure
6) make depend
7) make

To run an experiment using pathChirp read the README_PATHCHIRP file.

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Please report any bugs or send comments regarding these programs to vinay@rice.edu

August, 2004, Vinay Ribeiro