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Project 1 – Distance Vector Routing
1 Problem Statement
The goal of this project is for you to learn to implement distributed routing algorithms, where all routers run
an algorithm that allows them to transport packets to their destination, but no central authority determines
the forwarding paths. You will implement code to run at a router, and we will provide a routing simulator
that builds a graph connecting your routers to each other and to simulated hosts on the network. By the end
of this project, you will have implemented a version of a distance vector protocol that computes efficient
paths across the network.
2 Getting a bit more Concrete
In much of the class material, we discussed routing abstractly, i.e., the algorithms discussed were used on
graphs and computed distances between every pair of nodes. In the real world, we have both switches/routers
and hosts, and you’re primarily concerned with whether hosts can reach other hosts. Which is to say, for
the purposes of this assignment, you need not compute routes to other routers—only to other hosts.
Similarly, we often speak about abstract links. Links in the real world are often a combination of a port (or
interface) on one device, a cable, and a port on another device. A device is often not aware so much of
a link as a whole as it is aware of its own side of the link, i.e., its own port. Ports are typically numbered.
When a device sends data out of one of its own ports, the data travels through the cable and is received by
the port on the other side. The API functions in the simulator reflect this: they deal in ports, not in links.1
3 Simulation Environment
You will be developing your router in Python 2.7 under a simulation environment provided by us. The
simulation environment, as well as your router implementation, lives under the simulation directory; you
should cd into this directory before entering any terminal commands provided in this document.
In the simulation environment, every type of network device (e.g., a host or your router) is modeled by a
subclass of the Router class. Each Router has a number of ports, each of which may be connected to a
neighboring entity (e.g., a host or another router). Each link connecting two entities has a latency—think
of it as the link’s propagation delay. Your Router sends and receives Packet’s to and from its neighbors.
Both the Router and Packet classes are defined in the sim.basics module. Relevant methods of the two
classes are displayed in Figures 1 and 2; now might be a good time to skim through them. You can learn
more about the simulation environment from the Simulator Guide.
Before we begin, let’s make sure that your Python version is supported. Type in your terminal:
$ python --version
You should be good to go if the printed version has the form Python 2.7.*.
1Don’t get these confused with the logical “ports” that are part of transport layer protocols like TCP and UDP. The ports
we’re talking about here are actual holes that you plug cables into!
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class Router (api.Entity)
handle_link_up (self, port, latency)
Called by the framework when a link is attached to this router.
port - local port number associated with the link
latency - the latency of the attached link
You should override this method.
handle_link_down (self, port)
Called by the framework when a link is unattached from this Entity.
port - local port number associated with the link
You should override this method.
add_static_route (self, host, port)
Adds a static route to a host directly connected to this router.
Called by the framework when a host is connected.
host - the host that got connected
port - the port that the host got connected to
You should override this method.
handle_route_advertisement (self, dst, port, route_latency)
Called by the framework when the router receives a route
advertisement from a neighbor.
dst - the destination of the advertised route
port - the port that the advertisement came from
route_latency - the route's latency (from neighbor to dst)
You should override this method.
handle_data_packet (self, packet, in_port)
Called by the framework when a data packet arrives at this router.
packet - a Packet (or subclass)
port - port number it arrived on
You should override this method.
send (self, packet, port=None, flood=False)
Sends the packet out of a specific port or ports. If the packet's
src is None, it will be set automatically to the Entity self.
packet - a Packet (or subclass).
port - a numeric port number, or a list of port numbers.
flood - If True, the meaning of port is reversed - packets will
be sent from all ports EXCEPT those listed.
Do not override this method.
log (self, format, *args)
Produces a log message
format - The log message as a Python format string
args - Arguments for the format string
Do not override this method.
Figure 1: Relevant methods of the Router superclass.
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class Packet (object)
self.src
Packets have a source address.
You generally don't need to set it yourself. The "address" is actually a
reference to the sending Entity, though you shouldn't access its attributes!
self.dst
Packets have a destination address.
In some cases, packets aren't routeable -- they aren't supposed to be
forwarded by one router to another. These don't need destination addresses
and have the address set to None. Otherwise, this is a reference to a
destination Entity.
self.trace
A list of every Entity that has handled the packet previously. This is
here to help you debug. Don't use this information in your router logic.
Figure 2: Relevant methods of the Packet class.
h1 h2 h3
s1 s2 s3
Figure 3: Linear topology with three hosts. Circles
denote hosts, squares denote routers, and lines denote links. A link has a latency of 1 unless otherwise
specified.
Figure 4: Sending a “ping” from the visualizer
in the hub example. (Packets shown are “pong”
packets sent by h3 back to h1 being flooded by
hub s2.)
4 Warm-up Example: Hub
To get you started, we have provided an implementation of a hub—a network device that floods any
packet it receives to all of its ports (other than the port that the packet came from). The hub is already
implemented and you don’t need to submit anything for this section.
Take a look at the hub implementation in examples/hub.py. Having no need to record any routes, the hub
only implements the handle_data_packet method to flood data packets.
Let’s try out the hub on a linear topology with three hosts (Figure 3):
$ python simulator.py --start --default-switch-type=examples.hub topos.linear --n=3
You can now access the visualizer at http://127.0.0.1:4444 using your browser; you should see the
hosts and routers displayed against a purple background. Let’s now make host h1 send a ping packet to
host h3. You can either type into the Python terminal:
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h1.ping(h3)
or you can send the ping from the visualizer by: (1) selecting h1 and pressing A on the keyboard; (2)
selecting h3 and pressing B ; and (3) pressing P to send a ping from host A to host B (Figure 4).
You should see the “ping” and “pong” packets being delivered between h1 and h3. You should also see
both packets delivered to h2 despite it not being the recipient. This behavior is expected since the hub
simply floods packets everywhere. You may also observe what’s going on from the log messages printed to
the Python terminal:2
WARNING:user:h2:NOT FOR ME: <Ping h1-h3 ttl:17 s1,s2,h2
DEBUG:user:h3:rx: <Ping h1-h3 ttl:16 s1,s2,s3,h3
WARNING:user:h2:NOT FOR ME: <Pong <Ping h1-h3 ttl:16 s3,s2,h2
DEBUG:user:h1:rx: <Pong <Ping h1-h3 ttl:16 s3,s2,s1,h1
Recall from class that flooding is problematic when the network has loops. Let’s see this in action by
launching the simulator with the topos.candy topology, which has a loop (Figure 5):
$ python simulator.py --start --default-switch-type=examples.hub topos.candy
Now, send a ping from host h1a to host h2b. You should be seeing a lot more log messages in the terminal,
and the visualizer should be showing routers forwarding superfluous packets for quite a while. Oops! This
is why our next step will be to implement a more capable distance vector router.
s1 s2
s3
h1a s4 s5
h1b
h2a
h2b
3 2
2
Figure 5: The topos.candy topology, which has a loop. A link has latency 1 unless otherwise specified.
We’ll be using this topology for demonstrative purposes throughout the project.
5 Distance Vector Router
We’ve provided a skeleton dv_router.py file with the beginnings of a DVRouter class for you to flesh
out. The DVRouter class inherits from the DVRouterBase class, which adds a little bit to the basic
Router class. Specifically, it adds a POISON_MODE flag and a handle_timer method. When your router’s
self.POISON_MODE is True, your router should send poisoned routes and poisoned reverses (and when
False, it should not!). The handle_timer method is called periodically (every 5 s by default).
2You can see a ttl field printed for each packet. The simulator automatically assigns each packet a “time to live” (TTL)—
any packet will only be forwarded up to some maximum number of times. The TTL is managed entirely by the simulator; you
should not read or write the ttl field.
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To guide your implementation of DVRouter, we have split the implementation process into nine stages,
each of which covers one aspect of the router. You should follow along stage by stage, and by the end, you
will have implemented a functional distance vector router!
Testing
To help you check your work, we provide you with unit and comprehensive tests. These tests will be the
only tests that we’ll use to grade your submission, i.e., there will be no hidden tests (see Section 6 for
details on grading).
The unit tests test each aspect of the router separately and correspond to the nine stages of implementation.3 After you finish each stage, you should run the unit tests for that stage (and all previous stages)
and make sure you pass them. For example, after you finish Stage 5, you can run unit tests for the first
five stages by invoking:
$ python dv_unit_tests.py 5
If your tests fail, you should read the test’s documentation and source code in dv_unit_tests.py to figure
out what the test does. You should not change any tests except for debugging purposes.
Hint: When you debug a test failure, you should read not only the documentation for a single test function
(e.g., test_handle_link_up), but also the docstring for the enclosing class (e.g., TestAdvertise), which
may include useful information about the common setup of all tests in this stage.
Note: The unit tests are not guaranteed to be comprehensive—it is possible for your implementation to have
a defect in one stage that manifests itself by failing unit tests for a later stage, or for your implementation
to pass all the unit tests but fail the comprehensive test.
The comprehensive test checks to make sure that your completed router has good routing behavior on
pseudo-randomly generated topologies. The test proceeds in rounds; in each round, it changes the topology
by adding and/or removing some random links, waits a bit for the routes to converge, sends pings from
every host to every other host, and then checks to ensure that the “ping” packets arrive in time.
After you finish your implementation, you may run the comprehensive test like this:
$ python simulator.py --default-switch-type=dv_router \
--default-host-type=dv_comprehensive_test_utils.TestHost \
dv_comprehensive_test_utils \
topos.rand --switches=5 --links=10 --seed=1 \
dv_comprehensive_test --seed=43
start()
This command will launch the simulator on a pseudorandomly generated topology with 5 switches and
10 links. The comprehensive test will start running after you enter start() into the Python terminal. As
usual, you may observe the test progress in the visualizer.
The comprehensive test will run indefinitely until a test failure occurs. If that happens, you can type
commands into the Python terminal and use the visualizer to debug.
3There are also “Stage 0” tests that simply make sure certain parts of the skeleton code are intact. You will not be graded
on the “Stage 0” tests.
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The command that starts the comprehensive test comes with two random seeds (specified by the --seed
flag). The first seed controls the random topology generation; the second controls how the test changes
the topology in each round. Feel free to provide different seeds to test your router under different scenarios.
For maximum efficiency, the comprehensive test always runs your router with “poison mode” turned on
(you’ll understand what this means once you get to Section 5.3).
Note: The unit and comprehensive tests are subject to change. Any changes we make before the deadline
will be publicized on Piazza.
Requirements
Before we get started with the implementation, let’s lay down some ground rules:
• Your DVRouter implementation must live entirely in dv_router.py; do not add other files.
• You should not touch the simulator code itself or the unit tests. Nor should you write code that
dynamically modifies the simulator or the tests. Additionally, don’t override any of the methods
which aren’t clearly intended to be overridden, and don’t alter any “constants.” You will receive zero
credit for turning in a solution that modifies the simulator itself or otherwise subverts the assignment.
If you’re not sure about something: ask.
• Your DVRouter instances should communicate with other DVRouter instances only via the sending of
packets. Global variables, class variables, calling methods on other instances, etc., are not allowed—
each DVRouter instance should be entirely standalone!
• The constructor (__init__) we provide for DVRouter defines several instance variables for the class
(e.g., self.peer_tables and self.forwarding_table). Do not modify or remove these definitions;
you’ll be using them later on. Similarly, do not remove any existing method definitions; you’ll be
filling in their implementations.
• However, feel free to add your own instance variables and/or helper methods, as long as they don’t
break the unit and comprehensive tests.
• Your DVRouter implementation must work with the unmodified dv_utils.py file (which contains
some helper classes).
• You should not need any additional import statements. It would be fine for you to use, say, Python’s
collections module. However, you should not use (or need to use!) the time, threading, or socket
modules. If you have questions, ask!
• You must solve this project individually. You may not share code with anyone, including any custom
test code that you may write. You may discuss the assignment requirements or your solutions—away
from a computer and without sharing code—but you should not discuss the detailed nature of your
solution. Also, don’t put your code in a public repository. We expect you all to uphold high academic
integrity and pride in doing your own work. Assignments suspected of cheating or forgery will be
handled according to the Student Code of Conduct4
.
Let’s get started on implementing DVRouter.
4
http://students.berkeley.edu/uga/conduct.pdf
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5.1 Construct and Use the Forwarding Table
Recall from class that when a packet arrives at a router on the data plane, the router consults its forwarding
table to determine where to forward the packet. In this first section, you will construct the forwarding table
and use it to forward data packets.
Data Structures
The forwarding table is constructed from peer tables. For each port, your router maintains a peer table,
which records all advertised routes it has received on this port. A route in a peer table is represented by a
PeerTableEntry object5
, which has the following attributes:
• dst: the destination for this advertised route.
• latency: the latency of the route from the neighbor to the destination (i.e., not including the
latency of the link on this port).
• expire_time: the timestamp (in seconds) at which this route expires.
For example, you may represent an advertised route to host h1, of latency 10, which expires in 20 seconds,
using this PeerTableEntry object:
pte = PeerTableEntry(dst=h1, latency=10, expire_time=api.current_time()+20)
Note, in particular, that you should call api.current_time() to acquire the current timestamp.
A PeerTableEntry object is immutable. If you wish to update an attribute, you should create a new
PeerTableEntry object with updated attributes.
A peer table is then represented by a PeerTable object, which you should use as a Python dict mapping
a destination host to a PeerTableEntry. You can construct and use a peer table like this:
pt = PeerTable()
pt[h1] = PeerTableEntry(dst=h1, latency=10, expire_time=api.current_time()+20)
pt[h2] = PeerTableEntry(dst=h2, latency=20, expire_time=api.current_time()+20)
for host, entry in pt.items(): # <-- This is how you iterate through a dict.
print "Route to {} has latency {}".format(host, entry.latency)
Your router keeps all its peer tables in the instance variable self.peer_tables, which is a Python dict
mapping each port number to the PeerTable object for that port.
Your router will merge its peer tables into a forwarding table, which contains the route chosen for each
destination. Your router will consult this table when making a decision on where to forward a packet.
A forwarding table is represented by a ForwardingTable object, which you should treat as a Python
dict mapping destination hosts to ForwardingTableEntry objects. A ForwardingTableEntry object is
immutable and represents the routers chosen route for a destination; it has the following attributes:
• dst: the route’s destination host.
• port: the port that this route takes (i.e., a packet for dst should be sent out of this port).
5All helper classes are defined in dv_utils.py.
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• latency: the latency of the route (from this router to the destination).
The router’s forwarding table is stored in the instance variable self.forwarding_table.
Stage 1: Compute the Forwarding Table
▶ Implement the update_forwarding_table method to compute a new forwarding table by combining
peer tables from neighbors, picking the shortest route to each destination. The new forwarding table
should be stored in self.forwarding_table. Don’t worry about populating the peer tables for now—
the unit tests for this stage will populate the peer tables in self.peer_tables for you before calling
update_forwarding_table().
To compute the total latency of a route, you’ll need the link latency of the port that the route goes through.
You can look it up in the dictionary self.link_latency, which maps a port number to its link latency
and is populated by the skeleton code in handle_link_up whenever a link goes up.6
Note: In case there exist multiple shortest paths to a destination, you may break the tie arbitrarily.
Note: The update_forwarding_table method is not responsible for checking for route expiry; it should
simply combine all existing peer table entries into a new forwarding table.
Stage 2: Forward Data Packets
Using its forwarding table, your router can forward packets on the data plane. The handle_data_packet
method is called whenever a data packet arrives at your router. ▶ Implement the handle_data_packet
method to handle data packets appropriately.
Note: If no route exists for a packet’s destination, your router should drop the packet.
Note: Moreover, to deal with routing loops, your router should treat destinations with long distances as
unreachable. Specifically, ▶ the handle_data_packet method should drop any packet whose distance to
destination is greater than or equal to INFINITY, a constant with value 16. (You should, however, leave
these long routes in the forwarding table.)
Note: Never send packets back where they came from! (This undesired behavior is called “hairpinning.”)
Stage 3: Advertise Routes
For routers to learn one another’s routes, each router must advertise the routes in its forwarding table to
its neighbors. There are many scenarios where a router should send route advertisements. For now, let’s
work on two of those scenarios.
Link up: When a link comes up on a port, your router should get its new neighbor up to speed by
immediately advertising all of its routes to that port. ▶ Add this feature to the handle_link_up method.
Timer: Your router should advertise routes periodically (every time the timer fires) in order to refresh the
routes and keep them from expiring. The provided timer handler handle_timer advertises all routes in the
forwarding table by calling self.send_routes(force=True). The force argument taken by send_routes
6The link_latency dictionary corresponds to the “cost table” introduced in lecture.
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dictates whether to advertise all routes (if force=True) or to advertise only those routes that have changed
since the last advertisement (if force=False). ▶ Implement the send_routes method for the force=True
case. For now, don’t worry about the force=False case—it won’t be needed until a later stage on incremental updates.
To advertise a route, you should construct and send a packet of type basics.RoutePacket, which contains
a single route. Its constructor takes a destination argument (the host that the route is routing to) and a
latency argument (the distance to destination).7
▶ Be sure to implement split horizon, but don’t worry about poisoned reverse for now.
To deal with routing loops, ▶ your router should stop counting at INFINITY, i.e., it should advertise
any route with latency greater than INFINITY as latency=INFINITY. You can achieve this by capping
route latency at INFINITY either when you create a ForwardingTableEntry or when you create a route
advertisement.
Note: We’ll add in logic to handle these route advertisements in a later stage.
5.2 Populate and Maintain Peer Tables
Now that your router can construct a forwarding table from its peer tables, we turn to populating and
maintaining the peer tables themselves.
Stage 4: Add Static Routes
For each host that directly connects to your router, your router should record a static route to that
host. ▶ Implement the add_static_route method to add a static route to the appropriate peer table; this
method is called by the framework for every host that directly connects to your router. You should treat
a static route simply as a route that never expires. To this end, you should set the expiry time of such
routes to PeerTableEntry.FOREVER, which is a float constant that is larger than any finite number.
Note: You may assume, if convenient, that links directly connecting to hosts will never go down (and so
static routes stay around forever), and that no host is directly connected to multiple routers.
At this point, your router should be able to forward packets between hosts that are directly connected to
it. Let’s try it out in the candy topology (Figure 5):
$ python simulator.py --start --default-switch-type=dv_router topos.candy
h1a.ping(h1b)
Observe in your terminal and/or in the visualizer that the “ping” and “pong” packets are being delivered
successfully. However, your current router cannot forward packets to hosts through other routers. Enter:
h1a.ping(h2b)
and notice that the ping packet is dropped by router s1. This is because router s1 won’t know of a route
to destination h2b until it handles route advertisements from its neighbors. Let’s implement that next.
7Take special note that RoutePacket.destination and Packet.dst are not the same thing! They are essentially at different
layers. dst is like an L2 address—it’s where this particular packet is destined (and since RoutePackets should never be directly
forwarded, this should probably be None). destination is at a higher layer and specifies which destination this route is for.
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Stage 5: Handle Route Advertisements
Recall from Stage 3 that your router sends route advertisements to its neighbors; these advertisements got
to be handled! ▶ Implement the handle_route_advertisement method, which is called by the framework
when your router receives a route advertisement from a neighbor. This method should update any relevant
peer table(s) and the forwarding table. Each time you receive a route advertisement, you should set the
route’s expiry time route to ROUTE_TTL seconds in the future (15 s by default).
Note: To get the current time in seconds, call api.current_time(). Do not use Python’s time module.
Now, re-launch the simulator using the candy topology, wait around 15 s for the routes to converge through
periodic route advertisements, and try h1a.ping(h2b). You should see the “ping” and “pong” packets
routed along the shortest path: h1a s1 s4 s5 s2 h2b .
Food for thought: Can you call h1a.ping(h2b) at an opportune time such that the ping packet and the
pong packet are forwarded along different routes?
Before you shut down the simulation, let’s explore what happens when a link goes down. Remove the link
between routers s4 and s5 by typing:
s4.unlinkTo(s5)
and try sending a ping from h1a to h2b. Even though there still exists a route between the two hosts through
router s3, you will see the ping packet get forwarded to router s4 and get dropped—s4 wants to forward
the packet to s5, to which it is no longer connected! In the next stage, you will be adding functionality to
handle route removals correctly so that the ping would take the alternate route.
Stage 6: Remove Routes
Your router should remove routes in two cases.
Link down. When a link goes down, your router should stop forwarding packets to that link. ▶ Implement
the handle_link_down method, which is called by the framework when a link goes down, to remove any
routes that goes through that link.
When you’re done, re-launch the simulation, wait for routes to converge, remove the s4—s5 link, and
send a ping from h1a to h2b (we’ll refer to this as the “link down” experiment). Unfortunately, you should
still see the same undesired outcome—the ping packet getting dropped by router s4. This is because even
though s4 stops advertising its route to h2b after the link down event, its neighbor s1 still remembers that
route and so continues to forward the ping packet to s4. To fix this problem, let’s make sure that a route
expire when it is no longer being advertised.
Timer. Previously, you assigned expiry times to your peer table entries. ▶ Implement the expire_routes
method, which should clear out any expired routes and update the forwarding table as appropriate. The
expire_routes method is called in the timer handler by the skeleton code.
Now, if you re-run the “link down” experiment, you should see the ping packet being forwarded correctly
along the alternate route roughly 15 s after the link down event—this is when the old route has expired.
Your distance vector router now has all its basic functionality! However, it’s not super efficient—for ex-
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ample, route convergence takes quite a while in the candy topology. In the next (and last) portion of this
programming project, we’ll add in some extra loop prevention logic and some optimizations to make route
propagation and removal more efficient.
5.3 Enhancements
Stage 7: Poisoned Reverse
In a previous stage, you implemented split horizon as a loop prevention mechanism. Let’s get more aggressive
with loop prevention by actively advertising the non-existence of a route to the port that the route takes.
▶ Augment your send_routes method to implement poisoned reverse—to each neighbor, advertise as
unreachable any destination for which this router’s route goes through that neighbor. (These would be
route advertisements with latency=INFINITY.) You should send poisoned reverse advertisements only if
self.POISON_MODE is True; when poison mode is off, you should still implement split horizon!
Stage 8: Incremental and Triggered Updates
Figure 6: Triggered route advertisements are sent as soon as
the simulation starts.
Recall from previous stages that it took quite a while (at least 15 s) for
routes to converge when you started the simulator on the candy topology,
partly because your routers only advertised routes every time the timer
fires. Route convergence would become faster if routes are advertised
every time the forwarding table changes.
In this stage, you’ll be implementing incremental and triggered updates—
your router will advertise routes every time its forwarding table is updated (triggered), and will advertise only those routes that have changed
(incremental). Don’t worry about removed routes for now.
You will implement incremental updates by augmenting the send_routes
method to handle the force=False case, where only route advertisements that differ from before should be sent. Here is our recommended implementation strategy:
• Maintain a “history” data structure that records the latest route advertisement sent out of each port
for each destination host.
• Implement send_routes(force=False) so that it sends a route advertisement only if (1) it is missing
from the “history” data structure, or (2) it differs from the corresponding entry in the history.
• Implement send_routes(force=True) to simply send all route advertisements, ignoring the history.
• In either case, send_routes should update the “history” data structure as appropriate.
▶ Implement the force=False case for the send_routes method. Then, ▶ send incremental triggered
updates by calling send_routes(force=False) wherever necessary. (In how many different places do you
need to insert this call?)
Hint: The timer should still advertise all routes as before.
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To see the improved route convergence performance in action, re-launch the simulator on the candy topology, but don’t pass the --start argument (and so the simulation doesn’t start immediately):
$ python simulator.py --default-switch-type=dv_router topos.candy
Open the visualizer in a browser window (http://localhost:4444), and then start the simulation from
the Python terminal:
start()
Observe the route advertisement packets that get sent immediately (Figure 6). Wait around 5 s, then send
a ping from host h1a to host h2b. You should see the “ping” and “pong” packets routed along the shortest
path h1a s1 s4 s5 s2 h2b . The route from h1a to h2b has converged to the shortest route!
Stage 9: Route Poisoning
In this stage, you’ll improve incremental updates by poisoning any routes that are removed from the
forwarding table, i.e., advertise those routes as latency=INFINITY. You should poison routes only when
self.POISON_MODE is set to True.
Since poison advertisement packets can be dropped, your router should make sure to advertise poisoned
routes periodically for at least ROUTE_TTL seconds (15 s by default). Ideally, these periodic advertisements
should halt after a while (since it is of little use to keep advertising the nonexistence of a route), but we
will not test you on this.
▶ Augment your code to implement route poisoning when self.POISON_MODE is set.
6 Submitting your work and Grading
Submission instructions will be posted on Piazza before the deadline. Be sure to familiarize yourself with
the late policy outlined in the syllabus on the course website.
The grade for your DVRouter implementation will come from two parts:
• 90% of your grade will come from the unit tests that we have provided to you. This portion of your
grade is split equally among the nine stages (i.e., 10% for each stage). Within each stage, all tests
are weighted equally.
• 10% of your grade will come from the comprehensive test. As explained in the beginning of Section 5,
the comprehensive test will only be run with poison mode turned on.
Any further details on grading will be posted on Piazza.