[Bloat] TEACUP -- automating TCP experiments on small testbeds

[grenville armitage <garmitage@swin.edu.au>]

All,

(Apologies to those who have already seen this elsewhere...)

There is a chance some people doing TCP & bufferbloat experiments might find the following tool useful:

http://caia.swin.edu.au/tools/teacup

We built TEACUP (TCP Experiment Automation Controlled Using Python) to automate many aspects of running TCP performance experiments in our small, specially-constructed physical testbed. TEACUP enables repeatable testing of different TCP algorithms over a range of emulated network path conditions, bottleneck rate limits and bottleneck queuing disciplines.

A key caveat: TEACUP assumes your physical testbed is a multi-host/single-bottleneck dumbbell-like topology with suitably configured end hosts and Linux-based bottleneck router. TEACUP does not try to run experiments over arbitrary network paths or the wider Internet (it is not netperf-wrapper). This has satisfied our use-cases, but YMMV :-)

We've released TEACUP v0.9 publicly in case it may be useful to other researchers who already have (or are interested in setting up) similar network testbeds.

cheers,
gja