U-Sphere

This repository contains a reference implementation of the U-Sphere protocol. For more information about the protocol see the following paper:

• U-Sphere: Strengthening scalable flat-name routing for decentralized networks. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2015.07.006

Running the testbed

In order to ease running of the distributed protocol testbed, a Docker image has been provided in the Docker registry. It contains all the dependencies that are needed to run the testbed. By default, the image will run the pf-b4 test, which uses a synthetic 128-node topology and performs some basic protocol tests (the StandardTests scenario).

After you have Docker and Docker Compose installed, you can simply start the testbed from the top-level directory as follows (assuming unisphere repository is in ~/unisphere):

$ cd ~/unisphere
$ docker-compose up

This will pull all the required images (a MongoDB database is required) and run the above tests. The above instructions will work on any Linux distribution, which is able to run Docker containers. For more information about installing Docker and Docker Compose, see:

• https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation
• https://docs.docker.com/compose/install

The scenario that is used by default will run for around 20 minutes.

Testbed configuration

The testbed is configured using a single settings file located at tools/settings.py. This file contains the cluster configuration (by default a single machine is used for everything, which is suitable only for emulating small topologies), topology configuration and scenario configuration. For example the pf-b4 test run is defined under RUNS as follows:

dict(name="pf-b4", topology="basic_single", size=128, scenario="StandardTests"),

This basically specifies that the basic_single topology generator should be used, which is passed the size=128 parameter. It also specifies that the testbed should run the StandardTests scenario.

Scenarios are defined as C++ classes in apps/testbed/scenarios.cpp and they may call test cases which are defined in apps/testbed/tests.cpp.

Results

After the test completes its execution, all results will be stored under a unique, randomly generated, test run identifier (for example 5b9e0) in the output folder. The results contain whatever the scenario's test cases output (usually CSV and GraphML files).