Implementing Pop-Routing – Midterm Updates

 

Hi Everyone!

Today has started the midterm evaluation, the deadline Is next Monday, so I have to show the work I have done ‘till now. It can be resumed in the following parts:


1) Refactoring of graph-parser and C Bindings

During the community bonding period I started working on the code of Quynh Nguyen’s M.Sc. Thesis. She wrote a C++ program capable of calculating the BC of every node of a topology [1]. I re-factored the code, and now it is a C/C++ shared Library [2]. I’ve also applied some OOP principles (Single responsibility and inheritance) and unit tests to make it more maintainable.

The interface of the library Is well defined and it can be re-used to implement another library to perform the same tasks (parsing the json and calculating the BC).


2)Prince Basic functionalities

After I completed the library a started working on the main part of the project. the daemon. We decided to call it Prince in memory of the Popstar.

This daemon connect to the routing protocol using the specific plugin (see below), calculate the BC using graph-parser, computes the timers and then it push them back using again the specific plugin. With this architecture it can be used with any routing protocol.I wrote the specific plugin for OONF and OLSRd. At the moment it has been tested with both, but I need to write a plugin for OLSRd to change the timers at runtime. For OONF I used the RemoteControl Plugin.

With these feature Prince is capable of pulling the topology, calculate the BC and Timers and push them back to the routing protocol daemon.

 

3) Additional Features: Configuration file, Dynamic plugins,

I wrote a very simple reader for a configuration file. Using the configuration file the user can specify: routing protocol host and port, routing protocol (olsr/oonf), heuristic, (un)weighted graphs.

As you can see from this Issue [3], I’m going to use INI instead of this home-made format.

As I said before I moved to a specific plugin all the protocol specific methods (pulling the topology and pushing the timers), to keep the daemon light I decided to load this plugin dynamically at runtime. So if you specify “olsr” in the configuration file just the OLSRd specific plugin will be loaded.

 

 

At the moment I consider this an “alpha” version of Prince. In the next 2 months I’ll be working on it to make it stable and well tested. The next steps will be:

 

  • Close all the Issues [4]
  • Write tests and documentation for Prince.
  • Write a plugin for OLSRd

 

Cheers, Gabriel

 

[1]: https://ans.disi.unitn.it/redmine/projects/quynhnguyen-ms

[2]: https://github.com/gabri94/poprouting/tree/master/graph-parser

[3]: https://github.com/gabri94/poprouting/issues/4

[4]: https://github.com/gabri94/poprouting/issues