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netsim-atc2022

Co-opting Linux Processes for High-Performance Network Simulation

Simulator

This page describes an open-source software tool for the research paper described on the home page.

A primary contribution of our paper is the design and implementation of a novel simulation architecture and a practical network simulator tool. The simulator tool has been released as open-source software and has been merged into Shadow, an open-source network simulation project hosted on Github. Shadow uses our simulator design as of v2.0.0-pre.0 and later.

Because Shadow is actively developed at the time of this writing, it has continued to improve and mature after the conclusion of our research project and publication of our paper. Therefore, there are multiple versions to consider:

If your goal is to use our tool for your own research, then you will likely want to download the latest and greatest version of Shadow following the latest guidance. We refer you to the Shadow website and the Shadow Github page.
Shadow at tag v2.0.0-pre.4 contains the design described in the paper, and this is the version we used to carry out our experiments. v2.0.0-pre.4 can be installed as described in the corresponding documentation or using Docker following our instructions below. v2.0.0-pre.4 is not the most recent version of Shadow, so you should only use it if you are trying to precisely reproduce the results in our paper.

Docker

Our paper uses Shadow at tag v2.0.0-pre.4, which requires the pidfd_open syscall: this syscall was added in Linux kernel v5.3 (published on 2019-09-15). Please ensure that your docker host machine is running Linux v5.3 or later, e.g., using uname -a. (The lastest version of Shadow from the Shadow Github page does not use pidfd_open and does not have this requirement.)

To install Shadow v2.0.0-pre.4 using Docker, first install Docker and git, and then run these commands:

git clone https://github.com/netsim-atc2022/netsim-atc2022.github.io.git
cd netsim-atc2022.github.io/setup
bash build_simulator.sh

Once the above commands complete successfully, you should be able to get a shell in a container with:

docker run \
    --privileged \
    --tmpfs /dev/shm:rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,size=10g \
    -it netsim:simulator \
    bash

Once inside the container, you can check that the installation is working:

/phantom/bin/shadow --help
/phantom/bin/shadow /root/test.yaml > shadow.log
cat shadow.data/hosts/client1/client1.curl.1000.stdout

You should see an HTML directory listing similar to the following:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Directory listing for /</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Directory listing for /</h1>
<hr>
<ul>
<li><a href="server.python3.8.1000.shimlog">server.python3.8.1000.shimlog</a></li>
<li><a href="server.python3.8.1000.stderr">server.python3.8.1000.stderr</a></li>
<li><a href="server.python3.8.1000.stdout">server.python3.8.1000.stdout</a></li>
</ul>
<hr>
</body>
</html>

Type exit to leave the container.