COTS-BPRD: Commercial Off-The-Shelf Backpressure Routing Daemon

COTS-BPRD (BPRD) is a backpressure-inspired routing daemon targeted at commercial-off-the-shelf Linux-based systems with IEEE 802.11 wireless networking capabilities. Based on a wide body of research literature, backpressure routing strategies are roughly centered around forwarding schemes that dynamically route traffic away from areas of high congestion along congestion gradients. BPRD consists of a network layer approach to backpressure routing and is implemented as a multi- threaded user-space program written in C. Key dependencies/features of BPRD include:

• libnl for dynamically querying and configuring network interfaces,
• iptables and libnetfilterqueue for capturing/releasing packets and tracking commodity congestion levels,
• libpacketbb for reading and writing hello messages that communicate congestion levels between neighboring nodes, and
• libnlroute for dynamically querying and configuring each node's routing table.

Build/Installation Notes:

• BPRD development took place back in 2012 on Ubuntu 11.04 32-bit Server. We have made necessary updates to at least ensure successful compilation on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit Server, but no guarantees exist on whether or not BPRD operates as intended.

• The following dependences have been noted on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit Server:

  • build-essential
  • autotools-dev
  • autoconf
  • libtool
  • pkg-config
  • libnetfilter-queue-dev
  • libnl-3-dev
  • libnl-route-3-dev
  • doxygen (optional)

• BPRD makes use of autotools:

    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure
    make
    make install
  

• Doxygen documentation may be built using:

    make doc
  

  These files will be built in doc/html/

• A design document in LaTeX/PDF formats is available in doc/bprd-overview

• Optional syslog configuration file provided in scripts/

• Optional bash autocompletion file provided in scripts/

Usage Notes:

• List command line options:

    bprd --help
  

• IPv6 not supported despite the ambitious command line option

• Commodities are specified in "ADDR,ID" tuples. BPRD will treat all UDP packets destined to ADDR as a tracked commodity and will place them in a libnetfilter queue with index ID.

• Commodities may be specified on the command line or via an input file. A sample input configuration file provided in scripts/.

Known Issues:

• fifo_length() does not check for null queue
• router_cleanup() not called when SIGINT issued

Acknowledgements:

Many useful resources were consulted in the development of BPRD. We have attempted to provide correct attribution where appropriate and possible. If you feel that we missed an opportunity to do so, please contact us!