A Declarative Toolkit for Rapid Network Protocol Simulation and Experimentation

RapidNet is a development toolkit for rapid simulation, implementation and experimentation of network protocols. RapidNet utilizes declarative networking, a declarative, database-inspired extensible infrastructure that uses query languages to specify behavior. RapidNet integrates a declarative networking engine with the emerging ns-3 network simulator.

Network protocols are specified using Network Datalog (NDlog), which is a distributed recursive query language. Protocol specifications in NDlog are compiled into ns-3 code (in C++) using the RapidNet compiler. The compiled code runs as an ns-3 application in simulation mode. The same NDlog specifications can also be used as an actual implementation using the ns-3 network emulator, hence providing a bridge between simulation and testbed-based experimentation.

The long term goal of RapidNet is to provide a unified platform for rapid prototyping, synthesis, and deployment of new network protocols.

RapidNet source code is available here.

Acknowledgments

This work is based on work supported in part by NSF grants CNS-0721845, CCF-0820208, IIS-0812270, and CNS-0845552.

RapidNet Development Cycle

Faculty

Boon Thau Loo, University of Pennsylvania

Students

Harjot Gill, University of Pennsylvania

Shivkumar C. Muthukumar, University of Pennsylvania

Xiaozhou Li, University of Pennsylvania

Changbin Liu, University of Pennsylvania

Joseph B. Kopena, Drexel University

Mihai Oprea, University of Pennsylvania

Tao Tao, University of Pennsylvania

Wenchao Zhou, University of Pennsylvania

Screencasts of the RapidNet Visualizer

Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) Protocol

Link State (Periodic) Protocol

Epidemic Protocol

Publications

Scalanytics: A Declarative Multi-core Platform for Scalable Composable Traffic Analytics. [paper]

Harjot Gill, Dong Lin, Xianglong Han, Cam Nguyen, Tanveer Gill, and Boon Thau Loo. 22nd International ACM Symposium on High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC), June, 2013. (15.3% acceptance)

SP4: Scalable Programmable Packet Processing Platform. [paper]

Harjot Gill, Dong Lin, Lohi Sarna, Robert Mead, Kenton C.T. Lee, and Boon Thau Loo. ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication (demonstration), Helsinki, Finland, Aug, 2012.

A Demonstration of the RapidMesh Development Toolkit   [paper]

Xiaozhou Li, Shivkumar C. Muthukumar, Changbin Liu, Joseph B. Kopena, Mihai Oprea, Ricardo Correa, Boon Thau Loo, Prithwish Basu. 4th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH 2009), in conjunction with ACM MobiCom, Beijing, China, Sept, 2009.

RapidMesh: Declarative Toolkit for Rapid Experimentation of Wireless Mesh Networks   [paper]   [talk]

Shivkumar C. Muthukumar, Xiaozhou Li, Changbin Liu, Joseph B. Kopena, Mihai Oprea, Richardo Correa, Boon Thau Loo, and Prithwish Basu. 4th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH 2009), in conjunction with ACM MobiCom, Beijing, China, Sept, 2009.

Declarative Toolkit for Rapid Network Protocol Simulation and Experimentation   [paper]   [poster]

Shivkumar C. Muthukumar, Xiaozhou Li, Changbin Liu, Joseph B. Kopena, Mihai Oprea, and Boon Thau Loo. ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication (demo), Barcelona, Spain, Aug 2009.