Description
1 Objective
The purpose of this assignment is to implement a distributed asynchronous distance vector
routing algorithm. By completing this assignment, you will learn about distributed computing
in a realistic network environment.
2 Overview
You will develop a program called Router to emulate the behavior of a router executing a modified version of the distance vector routing algorithm discussed in class. Several instances of
your router program will be started on possibly different hosts that communicate with each
other using TCP.
To have a controlled environment for this assignment, rather than directly communicating with
each other, the routers will communicate through a relay server as depicted in Figure 1. The relay
server forwards packets passing through it to the appropriate receiving routers, very much like
a switch. Unfortunately, the relay server is lazy and sometimes drops packets that go through
it!
Router
0
Router
1
Router
2
Router
3
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1
3 1
(a) Network topology with 4 routers.
Relay
Server
Router
0
Router
1
Router
2
Router
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(b) Relay server forwards packets.
Figure 1: Routers and relay server.
3 Relay Server
The relay server is implemented as a TCP server that listens on a specific port to communicate
with the routers. From the perspective of routers, the relay server forwards routing packets to
appropriate destination routers.
• Network Topology: Once the relay server starts, it reads the network topology information from a text file. The topology information is presented as the adjacency matrix of the
network formed by the routers. An example topology file is provided to you. It is possible
to specify several topologies in a single file. All topologies in a file should have the same
number of routers and be separated from each other by a blank line. If there are n routers
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Assignment 4 CPSC 441
in the network, each is uniquely identified with an ID in {0, 1, . . . , n − 1}. During the execution, the server can be instructed to cycle through the specified topologies to emulate
link cost change in the network.
• Routing Packets: The packets exchanged between routers and the relay server are of type
DvrPacket, which is implemented as a Java class. The source code for DvrPacket is
provided to you along with tester code showing how to use it. The class DvrPacket is
serializable so that its instances can be conveniently read and write from and to the socket
using object IO streams. Each DvrPacket contains the unique IDs of its sender and receiver. The relay server’s ID is denoted by SERVER, which is defined in class DvrPacket.
4 Router Design
Every router has a unique ID that is assigned to it when the router object is created. In your
implementation, in addition to the cost of the minimum cost path to each destination (i.e., the
mincost vector), you should also keep track of the neighboring router that is on the minimum
cost path to the destination (i.e., the next hop router).
In the following, we describe the main tasks performed by a router.
• Initialization: When started, each router must send a HELLO packet to the relay server
and then wait to receive a HELLO response from the server. The HELLO response contains
the link cost vector associated with the router. The link cost vector is sent via the instance
variable DvrPacket.mincost. For the routers that are not directly connected to this
router, the corresponding link cost values are set to INFINITY. The number of routers in
the network is equal to the length of the link cost vector received in the HELLO message
from the relay server. Upon receiving the initial distance vector from the server, the router
should initialize its internal distance vector and any other data structures needed by your
implementation.
• Operation: The router has to update its distance vector when it receives a routing packet
from its directly connected neighbors. The values received in a routing packet (carried in
DvrPacket.mincost) from some other router i, contain i’s current mincost vector to all
other routers in the network. Regular DvrPackets sent by routers are of type ROUTE.
• Termination: When receiving a routing packet of type QUIT from the relay server, the
router has to stop its operation, perform clean up and then return its forwarding table to
the calling process. The forwarding table consists of both the mincost and nexthop vectors.
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Assignment 4 CPSC 441
5 Routing Update
• Updating Neighbors: This part is slightly different from the algorithm described in class.
Rather than updating neighboring routers whenever there is a change in the local mincost
vector, your router should update its neighbors periodically (at fixed intervals) regardless
of any change in its mincost vector. The update interval is specified as an input parameter.
The updated mincost vector is sent in routing packets of type ROUTE.
• Link Cost Change: If a router receives a ROUTE packet with DvrPacket.sourceid set
to SERVER, it means that the network topology has changed. The new link cost vector for
the router is included in the received DvrPacket.mincost array.
6 Software Interfaces
For detailed information about the following methods and classes, refer to the Javadoc documentation
provided in the source code.
Define a Java class named Router, which includes the following public methods:
• Router(int routerId, String serverName,
Router( int serverPort, int updateInterval)
This is the constructor to initialize the router program.
• RtnTable start()
Starts the router and runs the routing algorithm in a loop until terminated by a QUIT
packet. The forwarding table of the router is returned once this method terminates. To
return the forwarding table, simply create an object of type RtnTable and return it, as
follows:
return new RtnTable(mincost, nexthop);
where mincost and nexthop are the mincost and nexthop vectors at the router.
Your implementation should include appropriate exception handling code to deal with various
exceptions that could be thrown in the program. A skeleton class, named Router, is provided
on D2L. Notice the import statement
import cpsc441.a4.shared.*
at the top of the file. The package cpsc441.a4.shared contains classes DvrPacket and
RtnTable to be used in your program. A jar file named a4.jar containing the package
cpsc441.a4.shared is provided to you on D2L. Make sure to add this jar file to your class
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Assignment 4 CPSC 441
path when compiling and running your program. For example, if you are using Java command
line tools, use the option -cp to include a4.jar in your class path.
The source code for classes DvrPacket and RtnTable is also provided to you as a source of
documentation for using these classes:
• DvrPacket: This class defines the structure of the messages exchanged between routers
(via the relay server). Each DvrPacket has a mincost array and specifies the packet’s
sender and receiver IDs, and the type of the packet.
• RtnTable: This is a wrapper class used by the Router.start() method to return the
forwarding table of the router.
The relay server is provided to you in a Java jar file called rserver.jar. The server comes
with a readme file that explains how to run it and set its various parameters.
Restrictions
• You are not allowed to change the signature of the methods provided to you. You can
however define other variables, methods or classes in order to complete the assignment.
• Your program should use the library file a4.jar. Do not use DvrPacket.java or
RtnTable.java in your code. The source code is provided to you only for documentation purposes.
• You have to write your own code for sending and receiving DvrPackets over TCP. Ask
the instructor if you are in doubt about any specific Java classes that you want to use in
your program.
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