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RoboCupAtHome / RuleBook

Rulebook for RoboCup @Home 2024
https://robocupathome.github.io/RuleBook/
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Network Setup 2019 | The Evergreen Topic #363

Closed warp1337 closed 2 years ago

warp1337 commented 6 years ago

Hi all, I would like to discuss/improve/chart the network setup for Montreal. Our advantage over the last years is def. that Nagoya's LOC deployed a smoothly working and incredibly well documented setup already. So, who needs to be added to this discussion?

Let's start the discussion by incorporating the knowledge from 2017 #173

@LoyVanBeek @kyordhel @balkce

warp1337 commented 5 years ago

@johaq bump :)

johaq commented 5 years ago

Ok. So at German Open we had 9 teams with on average 9 team members. The competition took place from Wednesday noon until Sunday noon. During the first 2 days we had traffic of 300GB(!!) with about 45 clients. I routinely checked for clients that were using a lot and reminded teams to be mindful. Then, during the last two days we "only" had 150GB with still around 45 clients. So either teams use a lot more during setup days and we need stricter monitoring then or the frequent reminders worked. Overall we had no big outages which is great. My takeaways for Sydney would be to expect 15GB of traffic per team per day which is also in line with what we have seen last year at German Open. Also on average teams have 5 clients connected to the arena network but some teams have a lot more and other teams less. Does someone know if Colm is reading this thread? If not I will also send these conclusions in an email.

warp1337 commented 5 years ago

Also maybe keep this in mind https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/RuleBook/issues/363#issuecomment-385353241

LoyVanBeek commented 5 years ago

As for SSIDs: I had a brief chat with Timothy Wiley of the Soccer SPL LOC and he said the number of SSIDs @Home wants (1 per team, for 25+ teams at a world cup) in one area would leave no bandwidth besides the SSID overhead. So that needs to change. In Sydney, there was was SSID per arena AFAIK, which access allowed via MAC-address that could be entered in some online form.

I didn't bother with the network, I just heard my team mates complain occasionally :smile: @MatthijsBurgh any feedback?

maximest-pierre commented 5 years ago

Feedbacks from the team were positive to this setup. Some teams were confused on how to register there mac address but other than that everything seems fine.

RemiFabre commented 5 years ago

The network quality was excellent in my opinion, both wired and wifi. The local "network team" was very reactive.

MatthijsBurgh commented 5 years ago

The Wi-Fi speeds to our HSR were horrible. During the finals we used our own consumer grade router which provided way better wireless speeds.

Also using routers on your robot in client bridged mode wasn't possible. This is really required, because you need same subnet acccess, when using ROS

The network in the teamarea was fine. Not the fastest internet I have seen on RoboCup, but pretty stable and sufficient speed.

kyordhel commented 5 years ago

I see little contribution in stating:

... unless we have the specifications and schematics of them. Please refrain your cheerleaders and focus on the engineering share.

What we know is:

For my network people to research.

  1. Is it feasible that all three leagues share the same SSID and just connect to a different (bridged) Access Point and work through the vLan?
  2. Is it possible to have all devices in the same vLan work under the same subnet?
    • If not, which are our alternatives?
    • Is it possible to use routers to redirect traffic and make it transparent to ROS?
    • Would VPN work better in this case?
  3. Would it be possible to use a radius-like server to authenticate clients trying to access the WiFi so only the competing team and the next one receive bandwidth, as well as all the network configuration so the device thinks it connected to a particular local network?
    • This would produce a super-strict schedule
    • VizBox would be necessary for this

Also, it would be nice if teams provide a list of network requirements.

awesomebytes commented 5 years ago

I don't know if it is a fair comparison but this year SSPL only had 6 teams and in Stage 2 just 3... in reality 2 competing. The usage of the WIFI was very low. Our team didn't have any issue as we already minimized our traffic taking this into account (50kbps with Rviz open with the debug stuff we need, if the reference number works for anything). Other teams complained that it was too slow. In my experience the network setup was very good, almost better than some days in the lab. Just don't stream image topics or massive TF trees.

Teams in the very back, specially (I think) OPL that had the furthest arena from the working tables, mentioned that they (and us, we were also in the very back, and the robot has a pretty crappy WIFI) had troubles booting the robots from there as the WIFI signal was very weak (the directional antennas were pointing in another direction, towards the arena).

moriarty commented 5 years ago

I think the HP / Aruba sponsorship and support they provided was great. The only things missing this year:

1) WiFi coverage in team areas- the team areas were largely forgotten about. 2) The bridging issue which effected TU/e. I don’t know if any other teams had as much issues. 3) The Lack of connectivity between Official WiFi<->Team Area (which is on purpose) makes it difficult to transfer code/train/debug/etc... but we need this air gap to ensure there aren’t people connecting to robots from the team areas during their competition runs. 4) External Compute Area, was a last minute addition: apparently teams only need it in stage 2.

warp1337 commented 5 years ago

I like the one SSID + multiple vlans approach. It think this is easily achievable. Traffic shaping on the other hand, additionally time/schedule based, is a different story. But I guess we can find this out?

One more remark: no matter what solution we implement, it cannot involve installing kerberos, radius certs or whatever bc teams will flip if they have to install additional stuff on their robot. This can however be mitigated by letting them know in advance. In the ideal case they don't have to configure their side of the network setup at all. Just plug and pray ;)

LoyVanBeek commented 5 years ago

I'd go for 1 SSID per arena. Otherwise, wifi clients go roaming and try to stay attached to any access point that just works, even if there is a more powerful signal from a different AP. Meaning: if you drive past another arena and attach to that AP when it has the same SSID.

This won't happen with different SSIDs for each arena.