Re: [manet] AODVv2 implementation

["Adamson, Robert B CIV USN NRL (5592) Washington DC (USA)" <[e-mail]>]

As Justin Dean mentioned, our nrlsmf code can act as tun/tap user-space forwarding engine (and works on Linux (including Android ... although newer Android policies have locked out use of some the the netlink APIs and I haven't tested that in a while), OSX/BSD, and even Windows with use of WinTAP (or whatever it's called).  We have done some stuff with that using our own forwarding tables or with the OS tables but not yet for AODV.  For AODV some sort of extra packet caching could be useful or do something similar with what we do with the Elastic Multicast implementation to flood until the "on demand" route is established.  Related to that the "nrlsmf" code has support for some hybrid policies that can be set related to flooding/forwarding such as token bucket limited forwarding rate until a route is established or flooding a small number (e.g, burst) of packets initially upon a new flow until a route is established.  With a little tweaking, these could be extended a little bit to support other caching strategies if desired.

Also, with the code, I have _slowly_ been refactoring code to keep the forwarding plane aspects of the the nrlsmf "engine" distinct and separate from the control plane aspects with the idea in mind to eventually have the forwarding plane code be used independently in a kernel module (or elsewhere) with the various forwarding plane features we see needed for these sorts of protocols including duplicate packet detection, control plane updates like mentioned for AODV2 below, per-flow forwarding state, etc.  It's been _slow_ since my time to work on it is quite limited these days.  Meanwhile, we do get pretty good performance with it in user space, and I know there's improvements that could be made.

If the kernel forwarding table is used, there are ways (not pretty) to update by using a pcap socket to monitor packets and do that independently of the actual forwarding.  Again, not pretty or efficient, but a work around until such features are resident in the forwarding engine.  That's one of the things I see needed, including for the Elastic Multicast protocol operation, to have the forwarding plane notify the control plane, at least periodically and/or on an event-driven basis (e.g., new flow detected).  On Linux, I think that ideally would be through a netlink interface and my thought on encapsulating a forwarding mechanism like what "nrlsmf" provides into a kernel module would include that interface.  For example, to support the "per flow" packet processing and such notifications, I created a "Flow Description" data structure that's also used as an index on a modified Patricia Trie prefix-based radix tree (with field wildcarding support) to detect, identify, and classify packet flows for such purposes.

Cheers,

Brian

On 12/4/23, 9:04 AM, "manet on behalf of Henning Rogge" <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> on behalf of [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:


Hi,


I was thinking about how to implement AODV2 on a TUN but hit an
interesting issue when reading through the "Interaction with the
Forwarding Plane" chapter of AODVv2...


Chapter 6.4:
"AODVv2 needs to update the record of when a route was last used to
forward a packet".


Does this mean AODV cannot use the kernel routing forwarding system
and is expected to do everything in user space? I ask because the
"routing cache" (and its statistics for each route) were removed from
Linux in version 3.6.


Henning Rogge


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