Turn in this assignment by e-mailing to jmoroney@hawaii.edu your code specified below.
You must do this assignment individually.
The following description uses the words port and interface interchangeably, as is common practice. The only exception is that UDP ports are not UDP interfaces (there is no such thing as a UDP interface). Each simulated interface/port is given its own local UDP port to listen on, and a remote UDP port to send packets to. I suggest re-reading this paragraph until you understand it.
Likewise, packet and frame may be used interchangeably.
This assignment asks you to implement two programs, both similar to the two programs in assignment 10. You may re-use and adapt any code anyone on your team created for assignment 10. If you prefer, you may program in Python instead of C.
The first program (ethping) creates an Ethernet frame (packet) and sends it to your second program, then listens for and prints any received frames.
Your second program (ethlearn) forwards frames according to the learning bridge algorithm. If the destination MAC address is found in the forwarding table, the frame is forwarded only to the corresponding interface. Otherwise, the frame is broadcast out all interfaces except the one it was received on.
There is a special case when the destination MAC address is found in the forwarding table, and the interface that is found in the forwarding table is the same as the interface from which the frame was received. In that case, the frame has already reached the destination, and ethlearn drops the frame.
Before forwarding, broadcasting, or dropping the frame, the source MAC address of the frame is added to the forwarding table together with the interface on which the frame was received, replacing any previously existing entry for that MAC address. This is the learning part of the learning switch or learning bridge.
Your simulated learning switch should also print what happens with each received frame, i.e. one of
999 bytes 10:23:45:67:89:ab to fe:dc:ba:98:76:54, port 1, forwarding to port 3 35 bytes fe:dc:ba:98:76:54 to 10:23:45:67:89:ab, port 5, broadcasting 777 bytes ba:98:76:54:32:10 to 10:23:45:67:89:ab, port 4 (same), dropping
Unlike in assignments 9 and 10, the forwarding tables for this assignment are created dynamically based on the packets received.
When ethping sends receives a frame, it should also print the size, source, and destination:
sending 567 bytes 10:23:45:67:89:ab to fe:dc:ba:98:76:54 got 999 bytes 10:23:45:67:89:ab to fe:dc:ba:98:76:54 got 456 bytes fe:dc:ba:98:76:54 to 10:23:45:67:89:ab
Frame payloads may be any number of bytes from 0 to 1500. Including the 14-byte Ethernet header, frames may have between 14 and 1514 bytes. All your code should discard packets that don't fit these bounds..
Your ethping program should take five parameters:
ethping should create a buffer with s bytes of payload preceded by 14 bytes of header, beginning with the destination address, then the source address, and finally a two-byte Ethernet type with value 0x8888. The contents of the payload should be all zero bytes.
Your ethlearn program takes as many parameters as there are interfaces (you may assume there will never be more than 100 interfaces). Each parameter is of the form
localUDPPort/remoteUDPPort
Packets sent out this interface are sent using UDP, using as destination address ::1 and remoteUDPPort. In addition to sending, ethlearn must create a thread (a process would not work) for each interface to receive packets from localUDPPort.
Each interface is simulated by a UDP socket. The socket variables must be global and shared by all the threads. Each thread reads from exactly one of the sockets, but may send (forward or broadcast) frames to all of the other sockets.
ethlearn must have a forwarding table (with capacity at least 10,000 entries) mapping 6-byte MAC addresses to interfaces. This table is shared among all threads in the program (this shared table means we cannot use processes). Because it is shared, any thread accessing the table must first acquire a global lock (mutex -- see pthread_mutex_init, pthread_mutex_lock, and pthread_mutex_unlock), and must release the lock once the access is complete.
When one of the threads of ethlearn receives on interface p a frame addressed from S to D (that is, D and S are the destination and source addresses in the ethernet header), it must:
Simulate a network with two switches and two hosts, similar to the simulated network of Assignment 10. All of the switches and hosts are run on the same physical machine. Each of these commands is run in a separate terminal.
ethlearn 45600/45700 45601/45800 ethlearn 45700/45600 45701/45900 ethping 45800 45601 800 12:34:44:55:66:77 99:88:77:66:55:44 ethping 45900 45701 300 99:88:77:66:55:44 12:34:44:55:66:77
The learning algorithm will be more clearly shown with at least 3 switches:
ethlearn 45100/45200 45101/45300 45102/45400 ethlearn 45200/45100 45201/45500 ethlearn 45300/45101 45301/45600 ethping 45400 45102 100 12:34:44:55:66:77 99:88:77:66:55:44 ethping 45500 45201 200 99:88:77:66:55:44 12:34:44:55:66:77 ethping 45600 45301 300 ab:cd:ef:00:01:02 12:34:44:55:66:77
If all goes well, the first ethping message (100 bytes) will be broadcast throughout the network and add 12:34:44:55:66:77 to each of the forwarding tables. Then, each of the other packets should only be delivered to the first ethping, and not to the others.
Please follow the examples above in reporting the results of your routing table lookup. This makes it easier for the TA to grade a large number of assignments.
Turn in your source code for ethping.c and ethlearn.c or the equivalent Python code (and any other code, e.g. header files).
To pack several bytes (b1, b2, b3 ... bn) into a byte array, you can call
somedata = struck.pack(format,b1,b2,b3,...,bn)See the struct documentation.
You may also want to review the Python Socket Programming HOWTO.
If you connect your switches so there is at least one loop, you may enjoy seeing the packets being forwarded forever. Actually, they may or may not -- what determines this?
If you have extra time, you may reply to any packet that you have not seen before, and that is not an answer to your prior packets.
You may also have ethping send multiple packets when additional parameters are specified.
You could add an age to forwarding table entries, and discard any entries that are older than a certain age, e.g. 30s. This is not very useful in our setup, because whenever a host (ethping) connects, it sends a packet, which sets up all the forwarding tables in the switches the packet encounters. To see the full effect, you can add an optional delay before ethping sends its packet. Then, packets sent to the destination before the forwarding table entries expire should get delivered only to the old interface, whereas after the entries have expired, new messages for the host should be broadcast and reach the new location of the host.
Because our hosts are simulated, you can explore what happens if multiple hosts use the same MAC address. This is something an attacker might do on a LAN.
You may want to consider what algorithms are efficient for
storing and searching in the forwarding table in case of (a) large
number of entries, or (b) large number of interfaces, or (c) both.
Computer Networks, ICS 451
Instructor: Edo Biagioni