Programming Assignment 3 Explanation

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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cloud Networking

172 ratings

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cloud Networking

172 ratings

Course 5 of 6 in the Specialization Cloud Computing

In the cloud networking course, we will see what the network needs to do to enable cloud computing. We will explore current practice by talking to leading industry experts, as well as looking into interesting new research that might shape the cloud network’s future. This course will allow us to explore in-depth the challenges for cloud networking—how do we build a network infrastructure that provides the agility to deploy virtual networks on a shared infrastructure, that enables both efficient transfer of big data and low latency communication, and that enables applications to be federated across countries and continents? Examining how these objectives are met will set the stage for the rest of the course. This course places an emphasis on both operations and design rationale—i.e., how things work and why they were designed this way. We're excited to start the course with you and take a look inside what has become the critical communications infrastructure for many applications today.

From the lesson

Week 5 - Programming Assignment Submission

There is no new content in this module. You can find all the information about the programming assignments here, as well as submit your programming assignments here.

Programming Assignment 3 Explanation 11:04

Meet the Instructors

P. Brighten Godfrey
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Ankit Singla
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich

[MUSIC]

In the last assignment we implemented a traffic monitor to collect statistics

about each host bandwidth usage.

We saw in our dashboard how one tenant consumed almost all of the available

bandwidth in the network.

As a result, the video quality in another tenants application suffered.

This is partly due with the nature of our applications.

Our video stream is adaptive, so when it competes with other flows,

the quality is scaled down.

It's also a result of the protocol of these applications you're using.

All our iperf flows are using UDP, so

they don't compete fairly with the video stream.

Remember from our previous assignments,

our naive routing policy will send all traffic through one core switch.

As a result, the switch s104 becomes a bottleneck in our network.

In this assignment, we'll improve this policy by using all core switches.

We'll keep it simple by pre-assigning tenants to each core switch.

So you won't need to worry about having to figure out how to balance tenants across

the core switches.

Specifically, we'll write a small amount of code to generate rules for

the edge switches.

These rules will route traffic to the core switch based on the packet's

destination host and which tenant that host belongs to.

We use the same topology as before.

Switches will be named the same and ports will be numbered the same.

We'll statically assign each core switch to handle the different tenant.

Here, we've assigned core switch s104 to handle all traffic for

VLAN 0, which is our video streaming tenant and

s105 will handle traffic for VLAN 1, which is our iperf tenant.

So our routing policy will look like this, switch s102 and s103 will forward

all packets to s104 or that are destined for the video streaming hosts.

And switches s101, s102, and s103,

before all traffic to s105 for iperf traffic.

So the global policy will look like this.

This will be done programmatically, but

you'll only need to write a very small amount of code to do this.

So let's look exactly at what you'll need to write.

So I'll start by walking through you through the relevant code, and

then show you how the system should behave if your code works properly.

So our setup will be exactly the same as a previous assignment, so

let's look at the code you'll need to write.

So we'll edit the file policy under the directory /cloudnetmooc/minidc/controller.

So if we open file policy.py.

So we'll edit the file policy.py.

If you look at the top of this file, you'll see a description

of useful classes and functions that you might need for this assignment.

So the first is CoreSwitch class which stores information about the core

switches.

Specifically the name, it's dpid and

a list of the pre-assigned VLANs that that switch will handle.

In the edge class, we have the name and the dpid properties and

we also have a list called neighbors which is the host attached to that switch.

In the host class we have mame which is it's name like h6,

the MACaddress, switch which is which switch the host is connected to.

And VLANs which is a list of the VLANs which with that host is associated.

And finally, we have a topology class.

So this has a list of hosts, switches,

core switches and edge switches, and

a dictionary of VLANs with the key VLAN number and

what hosts are part of that VLAN.

The ports dictionary, we saw it in the last assignment which

takes a switch name as the first key and a number as a second key.

And returns the host or switch connected to the port on that switch.

For this assignment you might also find the function getVlanCore useful.

Which takes a vlanId and returns the pre-assigned core switch for that VLAN.

In this assignment, you'll edit the class static policy.

Specifically the build function, but first let's look at the current

policy that our system is using which is the class default policy.

You can use this class

as a rough template for

your solution.

So let's look specifically at the function build,

which builds the routingTable for our policy.

So remember with this policy,

all traffic from edge switches is sent through one core switch.

So we can see we start by creating an empty routing table which is a dictionary.

And a routing table is structured as a dictionary where each key is a switch,

either a core switch or an edge switch and the value is a list of rules.

So we can see here that we then take one core switch from

the list of core switches in out topology and it's dpid.

Then we initialize our routing table.

With an entry for only that coreSwitch using its dpid.

The first block of code creates rules for

core switches to send packets from a core switch down to an edge switch.

So in each core switch, we install a rule that says,

if a pack's destination matches some host MAC address forwarded out some part.

So which port do we forward it out?

We forwarded out the part connected to the edge switch for that destination host.

So let's look at a quick example before further exploring this code.

So suppose we're creating a rule for the core switch s104,

if we see a packet destined for host h1, we want to forward it closer to host h1.

We do this by sending it out a port that connects the core switch

to h1s edge switch which is s102.

So with our destination h1 we'll send it out the port

connected to switch s102 which we can see is port two.

Now let's look at the second block of code which installs rules in the edge switches.

There'll be two types of rules in an edge switch.

The first, says that if a destination is a host connected to that switch,

it forwards it out the port for that host.

So this is what we call a neighboring host.

Otherwise we send it out a port to a core switch.

Now in our [INAUDIBLE] policy remember we send all traffic to one core switch.

So here in the else block we can see that we determine the outport for

non neighboring host using the topo.ports dictionary again.

We pass it the name of the edge switch where the packet is currently located.

And the core name, which remember earlier was

the single core that we're using in our policy.

And the ordering matters in this topo.ports object.

So if we want to look up the outport on switch s104 for switch s102,

we'd type something like topo.ports s104 and then s102.

If we wanted the output on switch s102 we reverse it.

So s102 would be first and s104 would be second.

So now your solution will be to implement a block of code

just like this second block.

But we want to use all core switches.

So if we look at the comment for the block that you need to add in the class

static policy, we have given you a hint to use the function debt VLAN core.

So this will return the core switch.

Stack be assigned to a given vlanId.

And remember,

the documentation at the top of a file will describe how to find a host's vlanId.

Now, to verify your routing policy works.

Let's start up our system.

To start two terminals, one for

the network emulator and one for the controller.

And we'll use the vid parameter, just as before.

And remember the pseudo password is lower case M-O-O-C.

Now, open a Chrome browser from the desktop.

Remember not to open one from the Chrome instance running

video streaming application as this is a Sandbox and bring up our dashboard.

To lower the new policy, select the static radio button and then press Update Policy.

Then go back to the video streaming

application and restart the page.

So after a few seconds we should notice that our video starts to play in high

quality.

You might need to wait 5 or 10 or 15 seconds before it switches.

And you can see the aspect ratio changes and the quality is higher.

Let's also look at our traffic monitor data.

We can see now that our hosts for the video streaming application are higher.

You can see the spike here what started playing in high definition.

So this means that we're moving toward a fairer routing policy.

This concludes the walk through for assignment three.

In the next video, we'll learn how to improve our writing policy to handle

a larger typology with more tenets.

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