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ModelNet-TE: An emulation tool for the study of P2P and traffic engineering interaction dynamics

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Abstract

In the Internet, user-level performance of P2P applications may be determined by the interaction of two independent dynamics: on the one hand, by the end-to-end control policies applied at the P2P application layer (L7); on the other hand, by Traffic Engineering (TE) decisions taken at the network level (L3). Currently available tools do not allow to study L7/L3 interactions in realistic settings due to a number of limitations. Building over ModelNet, we develop a framework for the real-time emulation of TE capabilities, named ModelNet-TE, that we make available to the scientific community as open source software. ModelNet-TE allows (i) to deploy real unmodified Internet P2P applications, and to test their interaction with (ii) many TE algorithms, as its design allows to easily integrate other TE algorithms than those we already provide, (iii) in a furthermore controlled network environment. Due to these features, ModelNet-TE is a complementary tool with respect to hybrid simulation/protoyping toolkits (that constrain application development to a specific language and framework, and cannot be used with existing or proprietary applications) and to other open testbeds such as PlanetLab or Grid5000 (lacking of control or TE-capabilities respectively). ModelNet-TE can thus be useful to L7-researchers, as it allows to seamlessly and transparently test any existing P2P application without requiring any software modification. At the same time, ModelNet-TE can be useful to L3-researchers as well, since they can test their TE algorithms on the traffic generated by real applications. As a use case, in this work we carry on an experimental campaign of L7/L3 routing layers interaction through ModelNet-TE. As TE we consider the classic minimum congestion load-balancing, that we compare against standard IP routing. As example P2P applications, we take BitTorrent, one among the most popular file-sharing applications nowadays, and WineStreamer, an open source live-streaming application. We emulate BitTorrent and WineStreamer swarms over both realistic topologies (e.g., Abilene) and simplistic topologies that are commonly in use today (e.g., where the bottleneck is located at the network edge) under a variety of scenarios. Results of our experimental campaign show that user-level performance may be significantly affected by both the TE mechanism in use at L3 (e.g., due to interactions with TCP congestion control or P2P chunk trading logic), as well as scenario parameters that are difficult to control in the wild Internet, which thus testifies the interest for tools such as ModelNet-TE.

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Notes

  1. ModelNet-TE flips a bit of the virtual destination address, which forces packets to exit the Host (instead of being “captured” by the loop-back interface), and be directed to the Core (which is set as Host default gateway). The same bit of the IP destination address is then flipped again at packet reception in the Core.

  2. As our patch applies only to specific versions of the Linux kernel (namely 2.6.18 or 2.6.22), and so as to reduce the startup time for new users, we directly provide full ready-to-use system images of the patched Core and Host machines, containing the source code as well.

  3. Clearly, instrumentation of the P2P application, whether possible, can bring a more detailed view of the QoE perceived by P2P users. At the same time, we provide basic QoS monitoring of end-point traffic (e.g., traffic volumes, delay, jitter, losses, etc.) that are general enough for any P2P applications.

  4. At the same time, care should be taken in this case, as [47] experienced degradation of ModelNet precision for aggregate traffic exceeding 600 Mbps, so that further testing would be needed in this case.

  5. The support for different operations simplify the implementation of different algorithms, that may rely on different inputs (e.g., average for iAWM [7] or maximum for [42]).

  6. This may be due to the fact that [67] exhaustively explores all torrents, while observation in [46] are limited to a smaller torrents catalog.

  7. Notice that edge-to-edge latencies are measured between any pair of gateways GW (or IP routers), taking into account the physical distance between US cities. End-to-end latencies are emulated by additionally taking into account the local loop network beside the access GW [36].

  8. HRC was however not available at the time of the experimental campaign.

  9. Since TCP is advantaged by smaller RTT, applications preferring high-bandwidth peers will also likely prefer nearby peers. Even for applications such as PPLive, using UDP at L4 and measuring transfer rates at L7, we experimentally verified that bandwidth preference induces a clustering of nearby peers [54].

  10. Notice that this should change with the recent ability in OneLab to reserve resources similarly to what happens in Grid5000

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by FP7 STREP NAPA-WINE. Authors wish to thank Eugenio Alessandria and Luca Muscariello for their initial help on this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Telecom ParisTech, 23 avenue d’Italie, 75013, Paris, France

    Dario Rossi & Paolo Veglia

  2. Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), LIP6, 4 place Jussieu, 75252, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Matteo Sammarco

  3. Instituto de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Julio Herrera y Reissig 565, CP 11300, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Federico Larroca

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  1. Dario Rossi
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  2. Paolo Veglia
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  4. Federico Larroca
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Correspondence to Paolo Veglia.

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Rossi, D., Veglia, P., Sammarco, M. et al. ModelNet-TE: An emulation tool for the study of P2P and traffic engineering interaction dynamics. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 6, 194–212 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-012-0134-x

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