MIPv6 Trace Analysis Scripts

Introduction

One interest area of the Digital Technology Group is handovers between different types of network using Mobile IPv6. Various people over the years have carried out this work using a live testbed, connected to the BT Exact IPv6 backbone, and also the Vodafone GPRS network. The testbed generates large tcpdump files, which require easy analysis.

For the paper Is Latency The Real Enemy in Next Generation Networks?, I developed a suite of tcpdump analysis tools which enabled us to easily parse the data and obtain useful graphs. Whilst these tools are highly specific to the format of the data, they may be of use to others.

Tools

All of these are written in the Perl scripting language. The code is commented sufficiently (and is simple enough!) that understanding it should be easy. The code is Copyright 2005 David Cottingham. You may re-use it as you wish, provided that it retains the copyright notice in the header of the code. The code is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, including (but not limited to) those of merchantability or fitness for purpose, and the the author disclaims as far as is possible all liability for any and all damages arising from their use.

RttThroughput.pl: takes a dump of an MIPv6 handover, locates the point at which the handover occurs (by the DSTOPT DSTOPT packets), and then graphs the average connection throughput over time in gnuplot.
InterpolatePlot.pl: interpolates between data points found in an input data file to find the corresponding value for a given query value.
ConvertDumpsGeneric.pl: converts a directory of tcpdump files to text format and strips out the Router Advertisement lines.
Average.pl: takes a file containing a column of figures (there may be multiple sets of these, separated by new lines) and averages them.
Sd.pl: in conjunction with average.pl, generates the standard deviation of a column of figures in a file.

Download as a tar.gz file (4 KB)

Publications

Is Latency The Real Enemy in Next Generation Networks?, David N. Cottingham, Pablo A. Vidales. In Proc. First International Workshop on Convergence of Heterogeneous Wireless Networks (ConWiN 2005), Budapest, Hungary.
PDF (389 KB)
MIPv6 Experimental Evaluation using Overlay Networks, Pablo Vidales, Carlos J. Bernardos, Ignacio Soto, David Cottingham, Javier Baliosian, Jon Crowcroft. Computer Networks, Volume 51, Number 10, Pages 2892--2915, Elsevier, July 2007.
Article on Science Direct