An Experimental Study of the Learnability of Congestion Control

This repository contains materials to reproduce the results of a paper, appearing at ACM SIGCOMM 2014, which explores the "learnability" of congestion control protocols through the use of an automated protocol design tool, Remy.

Prerequisites

You will need a C++11 compiler, git, an appropriate version of Protocol Buffers (see step 4b below), Python 2.7, and numpy.

Steps

0 [UPDATE] We run simulations in parallel using Makefiles. Each Makefile target is one simulation run. Each run relies on a command called pls that we used internally on our cluster to run jobs. pls isn't relevant outside our cluster, but it's hard to automatically regenerate our Makefiles to not use pls. Instead, please install a dummy version of pls on your machine as follows:

Make a file /usr/local/bin/pls that contains just these two lines:

!/bin/sh

exec "$@"

Then run: sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/pls

Alternatively, remove the pls command manually from each Makefile after it's autogenerated.

1. Get the base ns-2 tarball and untar it.

   tar zxvf ns-allinone-2.35.tar.gz 

2. cd into the untarred folder.

   cd ns-allinone-2.35 

3. Replace the original version of ns-2.35 with our modified ns-2.35 repository. (We leave the remaining components as is.)

   rm -rf ns-2.35 
   git clone https://github.com/pratiksha/ns2.35 ns-2.35

4. For each figure in the paper, this repository contains a folder with a README file, which provides the SHA-1 hash for a specific commit in ns-2.35. Check out the ns-2.35 commit for the figure you wish to reproduce using the appropriate SHA-1 hash:

   cd ns-2.35
   git checkout <SHA-1-hash>
   cd ..

   4b [UPDATE] The protobuf version on most machines has been updated since we generated protobuf outputs (dna.pb.h and dna.pb.cc in the ns-2.35/tcp/remy). The versions in our ns-2.35 repo (using protobuf-2.4.1) are most likely out of date relative to the protobuf version on your machine. To fix this, run the following:

   (assuming you are in the ns-2.35 folder)

   cd tcp/remy
   protoc --cpp_out=. dna.proto

5. Now install ns-2.35 with all its components.

   ./install 

6. cd to the decomposability folder in order to run the simulations.

   cd ns-2.35/tcl/ex/decomposability/

7. Follow the instructions in the README file of the appropriate figure's folder to run the simulations and summarize the results. The graphmaker and ellipsemaker scripts in ns-2.35/tcl/ex/graphing-scripts can be used to generate the ellipse figures from the results.

For questions or comments, please email remy@mit.edu