REAL 5.0 User Manual S. Keshav Cornell University skeshav@cs.cornell.edu   August 13th 1997


This manual provides a tutorial introduction to setting up a simulation in REAL. If you want to modify REAL you should read also read the REAL Programmers Manual.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. File organization
  3. Sources, gateways, and sinks
  4. Netlanguage
  5. Running the simulation
  6. A note on configuration

1. Introduction

REAL is a simulator for studying the dynamic behavior of flow and congestion control schemes in packet switch data networks. It provides users with a way of specifying such networks and to observe their behavior. Source code is provided so that interested users can modify the simulator to their own purposes. In my experience, anyone who uses a simulator ends up modifying it anyway, so I expect that users are capable of reading and understanding source code. This manual, and the programmers manual, are only a brief sketch of what is available, and what is possible with REAL.

The simulator takes as input a scenario which is a description of network topology, protocols, workload and control parameters. It produces as output statistics such as the number of packets sent by each source of data, the queueing delay at each queueing point, the number of dropped and retransmitted packets and other similar information.

Scenarios are described using using NetLanguage, a simple ascii representation of the network. The network is modeled as a graph, where nodes(vertices) represent either sources or sinks of data, or gateways (gateways are used synonymously with routers, bridges and switches to mean elements that route, buffer and schedule packets).

The interconnection between the nodes is the topology. You have to specify some network wide parameters, the transport protocol (in particular, the flow control) and the workload at each source. Finally, you must specify control parameters such as the latency and bandwidth of each communication line, the size of trunk board buffers, packet sizes etc.

2. File organization

The simulator files are in a directory called sim. This has four subdirectories - docs, sim, src and results. sim/docs contains online versions of the manuals. sim/sim has source code for REAL. sim/src has source code for NEST, the simulation package underlying REAL. sim/results stores the results of simulation (it is initially empty).

sim/sim in turn contains some subdirectories described by sim/MANIFEST.

3. Sources, Gateways and Sinks

In REAL, each user is modeled as a source of data regulated by a flow control protocol.

The combination of a workload and flow control protocol is implemented by a single C function. Each such function is executed in parallel by the underlying thread-based simulation package, and can be thought of as being an independently scheduled and non-preemptable entity (see NEST manuals for more details).

3.1 Source types

There are nearly 30 source types, corresponding to 30 or so transport protocol and workload types. The sources can be categorized into one of two types: flow-controlled and non-flow-controlled data sources. Flow-controlled sources use acknowledgements and timeouts to implement a reliable transport layer functionality over a lossy network. Non-flow-controlled sources generate data either from a known distribution or from a trace and do not provide a reliable transport functionality.

Except for the telnet source, most flow controlled sources assume that the users have a finite number of data packets ready to transfer, and that this data is available for transmission without any delay. So, whenever the flow control protocol allows data transmission, a packet to transmit would always be available. The telnet source assumes that users generate single packets with an exponential inter-packet sleep time.

3.1.1 generic

This implements window flow control with a fixed size window. This is similar to TCP before the dynamic window modifications by Jacobson and Karels.

3.1.2 telnet

A telnet workload is similar to a Poisson workload, but differs from it in two ways

3.1.3 jk_reno and jk_tahoe

These sources implement TCP flow control with the window adjustment and other modifications described by V. Jacobson, M. Karels, P. Karn and C. Partridge (V. Jacobson, "Congestion Avoidance and Control", Proc. ACM SigComm '88; P. Karn, C. Partridge,"Improving Round-Trip Time Estimates in Reliable Transport Protocols", ACM Trans. on Computer Systems, V9 No. 4, November 1991).

jk_tahoe implements the flow control in 4.3BSDTahoe. The window size can increase or decrease - decreases cause the window to be shut down to 1. Duplicate acks cause retransmission.

jk_reno incorporate further modifications made to TCP by V. Jacobson (as of Aug '90).

When duplicate acks are seen, the window shuts down to half its previous value, not to 1. Moreover, during fast retransmission, each incoming ack increases the flow control window by one.
 

3.1.4 dec

This implements the DEC congestion bit based window adjusting scheme [RJ 90]( K.K. Ramakrishnan and R. Jain, "A Binary Feedback Scheme for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks", ACM Trans. Comp. Sys. May 1990, V8 N2:158-181).

3.1.5 pp

The simulator now has code for packet-pair flow control. The work is described partly in my Sigcomm'91 paper ("A Control theoretic approach to flow control"), and the code implements all the details described in my unpublished (and very long) paper "Packet pair flow control" as well as my recent work on retransmission described in "SMART: Retransmission: Performance with Random Losses and Overload". The pp.c source provided implements a transport layer that does both flow control and error control. Error control is with SMART retransmission, but no flow control. The pp.c source can also act like a 'transport layer', expecting another node to provide it with packets that it sends to the destination. When the option is set, each source requires a pair of nodes: one generates traffic from an arbitrary distribution (or reads it from a trace file), and the pp node performs error control, and optionally, flow control. This provides a very flexible environment for testing out packet-pair flow control in a wide range of scenarios.

The non-flow-controlled sources send data according to some parameterized distribution. The sources in this category are:

3.1.6 poisson

This is a poisson source that sends packets no faster than the bandwidth of the output line. Thus, the source is \fIclamped\fP to that speed. This source is useful in simulating cross traffic, and in validating queueing models.

3.1.7 background

This node is used to create and remove bottlenecks. The background source sends data at a chosen rate for some period of time, then is idle for some time, and repeats this cycle. The fraction of the bottleneck to use is governed by the average bandwidth parameter in the scenario file. The source can start at any phase in the cycle, can send data with some randomness in the sending rate Some parameters for this source are set from the file background.c.
 

3.1.7 controlled_rate

This is an on_off source that requests resources using a SETUP packet. The parameters for the source are on_time, off_time and peak_rate, described below in the `REAL parameters' section.

3.1.8 random_rate

This source sends packets so that the sending rate is no faster than some peak bandwidth, and the average sending rate is some specified average. These parameters are described through the scenario file. Random_rate sources also do call setup.

3.1.9 mmpp

This tries to emulate a Markov-modulated Poisson process data source. It is not an accurate model, but adequate for creating bursty cross traffic.

The table below summarizes these, and some other sources available in REAL v5 but not described above.

FILE 

  •  
  • DESCRIPTION

    background.c  sends background traffic on-off  at a nominal rate
    coder.c  MPEG coder that adapts its rate to the currently  
    available rate (needs pp.c as transprt layer) 
    controlled_rate.c  sends on-off traffic and also does call setup 
    dec.c  obeys DECbit flow control 
    ecn_error.c   template for error control assignment 
    ecn_flow.c  template for flow control assignment
    ecn_master.c  simulates shared channel for CSMA/CD (Ethernet) 
    ecn_receiver.c  generic receiver for assignment 3 
    ecn_router.c  really tiny router, but it works 
    ecn_sender.c sources to test the router 
    ecn_simple.c  template for simple source assignment 
    ecn_slave.c  simulates Ethernet card for CSMA/CD 
    ftp_vegas.c  untested code for FTP with TCP vegas flow control 
    generic.c  generic transport layer with windowing, timeouts, acks 
    jk_reno.c  implements flow control scheme of 4.3BSD-Reno 
    jk_tahoe.c  implements flow control in 4.3BSD Tahoe 
    mmpp.c something like a markov modulated poisson source 
    mpeg.c uncontrolled mpeg coder (reads values from file) 
    onoff.c  ON OFF source 
    onoff_closed.c  ON OFF source, off time starts when all packets generated during on time have been acked 
    onoff_closed_gbn.c  same as above, but does go-back-n retransmission 
    playout.c   plays MPEG video; complains if a frame misses its  end-to-end delay bound 
    poisson.c  poisson source 
    pp.c packet pair flow control 
    random_rate.c  sends data at random intervals, but conforms to peak/ave description 
    send.c   implements packet transmission functions 
    sink.c  universal receiver function 
    telnet.c  flow controlled poisson source (with windowing) 
    trace.c   reads a trace from a file and sends packets   according to that description

     

    3.2 Gateway

    The router implements several scheduling disciplines including:

    3.2.1 First come first served

  • This is standard fifo.
  • 3.2.2 Fair queueing

  • This is described in Demers, Keshav, Shenker, "Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm", Proc. SigComm 89 pp1-12, Sep. 1989. If RESERVATIONS is #defined in types.h, then weighted fair queueing is implemented, and weights will be computed, and buffers reserved, so that a source can be assured a minimum bandwidth and maximum packet loss rate. Threshold parameters allow overbooking of resources.
  • 3.2.3 fqbit

  • This discipline is identical to fq, except that it does bit-setting on packets.
  • 3.2.4 hrr

    3.2.5 decbit

    3.3 Sink

    sink.c implements a sink that receives data from any source. If the source is a guaranteed service host, the sink only collects statistics, and does not send an acknowledgment. Otherwise, it keeps track of the highest in-sequence packet received thus far, and sends an acknowledgment with that sequence number.

    player.c implements a video player. It keeps track of received frames, and complains if a frame is received after the delay bound.

    4. NetLanguage 5.0

    I now describe NetLanguage, a user-friendly way of describing network scenarios. Refer to sim/lang/example or to the Appendix for an example.

    A NetLanguage file starts with a heaer. The header contains identification information for your own use. It does not affect simulation in any way. This is followed by Nest parameters.

    passtime

  • How often (in simulation time) the monitor is called. I recommend 1 second, but you can make it larger if you want a faster simulator. An entry of the form a,b is a time value that represents `a' seconds and `b' microseconds.
  • maxnodes

  • Set this to the number of nodes in the simulation.
  • monitor

  • Selects the monitor (data collection entity) to use. You should use `custom_monitor' unless you write your own.
  • You now have to set REAL parameters. Here is a brief explanation of each field. Grep for the parameter in the source files to see how it is used.

    ack_size

  • is the size of the acknowledgment packet (for end-to-end acknowledgement) in bytes.

     

  • random_seed

  • This is the seed used to initialize the random number generator. If this is 0, the seed itseld is chosen at random. If you use the same random seed, the simulation will be repeated exactly.
  • buffer_size

  • This is the number of bytes of buffer memory that are available per output line (trunk board).
  • telnet_pkt_size

  • is the size of a packet sent by the telnet transport protocol in bytes.(This really should be in the node area function part of the file …).
  • ftp_pkt_size

  • is the size of a packet sent by a non-telnet source in bytes.
  • ftp_window, telnet_window

  • are the maximum sizes of ftp and telnet windows. (These are not the same as the congestion windows, but are their upper bounds.) The window size should not exceed the MAX_WINDOW_SIZE parameter in sim/sim/config.h.
  • decongestion_mechanism

  • This selects which packet to drop when a queueing buffer is full. If the paramter is 0 or 1, then the packet to drop depends on the scheduling discipline. For Fair Queueing or HRR, first, the conversation with the most bytes in the queue is selected. Then, 0 drops the packet at the head of the queue and 1 drops the packet at the tail. If the scheduling discipline is FCFS or DECbit, both 0 and 1 will drop the incoming packet. When this parameter is set to 2, the simulator selects a packet at random amongst all the queued packets and drops it.
  • policy

  • This is used to select the scheduling policy at the gateways. FCFS is 1, Fair Queueing is 2, 3 is FCFS + bit setting (DEC bit), 4 is Fair Queueing + bit setting, and 5 is Hierarchical Round Robin.
  • router, real_number

  • Used in distributed simulation. See the description on distrib/README.
  • end_simulation

  • This is the time at which to end the simulation run.
  • print_interval

  • Number of seconds of simulation time after which to print a report. All statistics, except min and max values, are refreshed every print_interval seconds.
  • hrr_levels

  • value for nb and b, as defined in [KKK 90]. If all the servers use the same value, it can be described here, else per node.
  • scale_factor

  • scales simulation time. For example, if scale_factor is 1000, one simulated second corresponds to one millisecond. This is mainly used to set initial values for hard-coded constants in transport layer protocols (such as the initial estimate of the round trip time).
  • Next, node and edge parameters are defined. To make it easier to declare the nodes, the first declaration in the block is the default declaration. The default defines the parameters of each node unless they are overridden by an explicit redeclaration inside some node. You can skip any entries in the defaults declaration if the simulation does not use them, and you may skip as many entries in the node declaration as you wish.

    The function field is the name of the C function that should run on that node. `dest' is the ID of the sink to which data should be sent. `start_time' is the simulation time at which the node becomes active. You should set plot to true if you want the node function at that node to generate plots (described later). The other values are self explanatory, and are commented in sim/lang/example.

    Edges are defined by source, destination, bandwidth, the latency in communication, and the loss rate. Losses are specified by the probability of bit corruption, probability of a loss burst, and the mean size of a loss burst. If the loss burst size isn't 1, then the length of a loss burst is chosen from an exponential distribution with mean set to the parameter 'loss burst size'. If the loss burst size is set to 1 (special case) then all losses happen as singletons.

    The endpoints of an edge are specified as source->destination, and all edges are bidirectional. The bandwidth is specified in bits per second, and the delay in microseconds.
     

    4.2 A note on usage

    Usually, you will not need to change the nest parameter and function declaration sections of the language file. In most cases, you should just copy these from the file sim/lang/example.l. It is necessary to give a .l extension to a language file. It is often useful to declare default values in a file, and to include them in the language file, particularly when several simulation runs are batched. One trick is to create a .s (for small) file that #includes some default files. The `asm' script in sim/sim/scenarios will assemble a .l file from a .s file, and may be of use. Finally, the results of the simulation will be placed in a subdirectory of the current working directory.
     

    5. Running the simulation

    If you plan to use the GUI, read the instructions in the RealEdit home page. Otherwise, make sure that FUNC_TABLE exists in the current directory. Then type

  • simulate <language_file.l> -p <port number>
  • This runs the simulation on the language file, and optionally connects to a gui waiting on the specified port.

    5.1 Simulation output

    The simulator produces two kinds of outputs a) time ticks and c) a simulation report. Time ticks are printed out every `print_interval' seconds of simulated time. They are just to show you that something is going on. Reports are generated every `print_interval' seconds. They are appended to a result file. The report file resides in the current working directory concatenated with the input filename without the .l. For example, if you are in director home/sim, and you run the simulator on file input.l, then the results will be in file home/sim/input. There are a couple of options: you can type in the input file without the .l if you wish, and REAL will complete the file name for you (of course, the file itself must exist with the .l). The report file is named `dump'. For example, if your input is input.l, then the report will be in home/sim/input/dump. Also, if the input file is supplied through indirection, then the standard output file defaults to `../results/dump'.

    The report is in the form of table and will look like this:

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Time    # Type          G/w Xmit Q'ing(min,ave,max)[#]  Drops Retx RTT(min,ave,max)
    
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    300     1 Generic       5(FC) 1434 0.29 0.93 1.19 [4]   0 1     0.00 1.04 1.30
    
            2 Generic       5(FC) 1436 0.10 0.93 1.19 [5]   0 0     0.00 1.04 1.30
    
            3 Telnet        5(FC) 63 0.20 0.99 1.25 [0]     0 1     0.00 1.10 1.36
    
            4 Telnet        5(FC) 67 0.00 0.97 1.16 [0]     0 1     0.00 1.08 1.27
    
    600     1 Generic       5(FC) 1443 0.89 0.93 1.19 [5]   0 0     1.00 1.04 1.30
    
            2 Generic       5(FC) 1441 0.89 0.93 1.19 [4]   0 0     1.00 1.04 1.30
    
            3 Telnet        5(FC) 55 0.89 0.97 1.12 [0]     0 0     1.00 1.08 1.23
    
            4 Telnet        5(FC) 61 0.89 0.98 1.18 [0]     0 0     1.00 1.09 1.29
    
     
    
    Summary
    
    Node G/w T'put(mean,var) Q'ing(mean,var) RTT(mean,var) Drops(mean,var) Retxs(mean, var)
    
    1       5 (1437.17 4.32 ) (0.93 0.00 ) (1.04 0.00 )     (0.00 0.00 ) (0.00 0.00 )
    
    2       5 (1437.33 4.37 ) (0.93 0.00 ) (1.04 0.00 )     (0.00 0.00 ) (0.00 0.00 )
    
    3       5 (58.17 3.62 ) (0.98 0.01 ) (1.09 0.01 )       (0.00 0.00 ) (0.00 0.00 )
    
    4       5 (67.33 8.42 ) (0.98 0.00 ) (1.10 0.02 )       (0.00 0.00 ) (0.17 0.37 )

     

    Every print_interval, a report of simulation statistics is printed. The first entry is the time (in this example, 300 seconds). For each source, the following data is printed:

    #

  • This is the node ID that of the node.
  • Type

  • This is the name of the node function running on the node.
  • G/w

  • This is gateway number for which the delays are reported. If the source sends packets through multiple gateways, then the report will print out data at each of the intermediate gateways. The gateway number is followed by the scheduling policy at the router. FC is for a router obeying FCFS, FQ, Fair Queueing, FB, Fair Queueing with Bit Setting, DB, DEC Bit setting, HR Hierarchical Round Robin.
  • Xmit

  • This is the number of packets transmitted from that gateway that originated from that source (including retransmissions) during the previous print_interval seconds of simulation time.
  • Q'ing

  • The minimum, average and maximum queueing delays, are printed, followed by (in square brackets) a snapshot of the number of packets queued in the per-conversation queue for that source at the time the report was printed. The queueing delay is computed as the time a packet had to wait in the queue from the time that its last bit arrived at the gateway to the time that the first bit in that packet was placed on the output trunk.
  • Drops

  • This is the number of packets from that source that were dropped by intermediate gateways.
  • Retx

  • This is number of packets that the source retransmitted.
  • Rtt

  • This is the min, average and max round trip time that packets from that source took from the time that the first bit of the packet was placed on the line to the time that the last bit of the acknowledgment arrived. In case of JK sources, it is computed only for packets that have never been retransmitted.
  • In order to avoid corrupting simulation results with data from transients that happen at start up, simulation statistics are flushed after each dump. Thus, the report printed each print interval presents statistics only for the last print_interval seconds.

    Note that to compute effective throughput you must subtract the number of retransmissions from the number of packets sent by the gateway. The effective load is the number of packets transmitted by the gateway plus the number of packets it dropped.

    If print_interval is long enough, the mean value printed out at the end of the interval will be a `large enough' sample of the path of a variable, and so can be thought of as a batch mean. From elementary statistics, we know that the batch mean will be normally distributed. REAL computes both the mean of batch means, and the standard deviation of these means. Using the normal assumption, 99% confidence will be achieved at 3 SD on either side of the mean of means. At the end of the simulation, the mean of batch means and SD of batch means is printed. This is headed by a line marked `Summary'. Then, for each value in the throughput, the queueing delay at each gateway, the number of packet losses from each source in each interval and the number of retransmissions in each interval are the mean of means and SD of means is printed. To avoid start-up transients from affecting the variance value, the parameter NSKIP #defined in table.c selects how many of the initial time periods to skip. The default value is 1.

     
    5.2 Plotting simulation variables

    Node functions in REAL have been instrumented to produce traces of certain variables as the simulation proceeds. For example, TCP sources print the size of the congestion control window whenever the congestion window could change. Plot values generated in this way are stored in a buffer, and when the buffer reaches a certain size (512 bytes by default), the buffer is either dumped to a file called 'plot' or sent to the GUI. If you aren't using the GUI, extract the separate files from the single plot file with the sim/kernel/demux utility. (time, value) tuples in plot files can then be post processed to derive other statistics, such as average values.

     The files that demux creates are of the form CCCxx, where CCC is an identification tag and xx is the node ID of the node which is producing the plot. The files appear in the same directory as the report file (see the description above). The currently available files are

    Rtt

  • Contains the estimated round trip times.
  • tao

  • Contains the actual round trip times.
  • win

  • Contains the congestion control window size.
  • e2e

  • This is the sequence of end-to-end delays seen by packets from each source during the course of the simulation. This can be post-processed to compute the frequency histogram of the end-to-end delay etc.
  • seq

  • The sequence number of the packet transmitted at that time.
  • In aplot file, the X axis (first element of the tuple) is time in seconds, and the Y axis is the data value. You can view plots with graphing packages such as ggraph or xgraph.

    To add your own instrumentation, you have to edit the node functions in sim/sources. Choose the variable that you want to plot, and at the appropriate points, insert the function call `make_plot(filename, variable);'. For example, to plot the window size, the command I use is `make_plot("win", cur_window);'. To plot real numbers, use `make_flt_plot()'. Recompile the simulator  and the plot files will be produced automatically for each node that has the plot option set in the NetLanguage input. Use `make clean' to remove old plot files.

    6. A Note on REAL Configuration

    7. Acknowledgements

    S. McCanne at Lawrence Berkeley Lab contributed some code for jk_reno.c and plotting.c, and reorganized the code in jk_tahoe.c. I have reimplemented some features based on his additions to REAL. S. Jamin at USC added the ability to specify result files. K.K. Ramakrishnan at DEC helped with the testing of DEC sources. R. Sethi at Bell Labs suggested the use of defaults in NetLanguage. D. Ferrari at UCB provided advice on statistics and other features. Last but not least, S. Shenker at Xerox PARC was the main instigator of REAL, and has provided invaluable advice over the years

    NetLanguage sample