FS: a network flow record generator

FS is a network flow record generator. It contains a discrete event simulation core to generate the flow records, and relies on existing TCP throughput models to drive the simulation.

FS is made available under terms of the GPLv2.

Note: the originally released version of fs as described in an INFOCOM '11 research paper (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/INFCOM.2011.5935055) is on branch fs-orig. The master branch is completely revamped and includes the fs-sdn code as described in a HotSDN '13 paper (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2491202).

Running fs

FS is implemented in Python and has a few external module dependencies:

To use fs, you need the following Python packages:

• ipaddr
• networkx
• pydot
• pyparsing
• pytricia (py-radix is no longer supported)

To install all the above, see the requirements.txt file here and use pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

I'd recommend using virtualenv, then installing the packages inside the venv. See http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv.

fs runs fastest using pypy (http://pypy.org) but also works well under the standard CPython implementation.

Examples

There are a number of example configuration files in the conf/ directory. To run a couple of the example configuration files for 600 simulated seconds, you might do something like:

$ python -OO fs.py -t 600 conf/ex1.dot
$ python -OO fs.py -t 600 conf/testconf1.json

fs supports a DOT configuration file syntax as well as a (basically equivalent) JSON syntax. For now, config file syntax is undocumented; take a look at the examples and our 2011 INFOCOM paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/INFCOM.2011.5935055

To use the OpenFlow extensions (aka fs-sdn), you'll need to clone the POX git repository and point your PYTHONPATH to it. fs currently is only tested with the betta branch of POX. Once you've done those things, there are two example configurations in the conf folder that should work out-of-the-box:

$ git clone git://github.com/noxrepo/pox.git ../pox
$ export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`/../pox
$ python -OO fs.py -t 60 conf/openflow_small_cbr.dot
$ python -OO fs.py -t 60 conf/openflow_small_harpoon.dot

The first few lines of output from fs when running one of the above example (OpenFlow) configurations should be:

0.0000 fslib.config INFO     Reading config for graph test.
0.0000 fslib.config INFO     Running measurements on these nodes: <a,c,b,controller>
    POX 0.1.0 (betta) / Copyright 2011-2013 James McCauley, et al.
0.0000 fs           INFO     Monkeypatching POX for integration with fs
0.0000 core         INFO     POX 0.1.0 (betta) is up.
0.0000 fs.core      INFO     simulation completion: 0.00
0.0600 openflow.of_01 INFO     [00-02-e4-0d-b1-e0 1] connected
0.0600 openflow.of_01 INFO     [00-02-f3-4f-f4-e2 2] connected
0.0600 openflow.of_01 INFO     [00-02-eb-ae-d3-63 3] connected

Acknowledgments

This software is based up on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-1054985. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Copyright 2011-2013 Joel Sommers. All rights reserved.

This file is part of fs, a network flow record generation tool.

fs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

fs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with fs; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA