Wikipedia on TFTP states:
Windows 2008 introduced pipelined TFTP
Its aim is to enable good throughput over high latency links. Unfortunately no reference is given.
The only other reference I found is Bazootftp mention pipelining-support.
So how is pipelining implemented? Is it negotiated per RFC 2347?
Is it possible to do pipelining, if only one side supports it (eg. via some ACK-tricks)?
I've seen Bazootftp add another packet-type, to signal the end of the stream.
Is Bazootftp's pipelining the same as in Windows?
And I haven't exactly understand, how the windowing works, esp. with lost packets.
Any hints appreciated.
Pipelining TFTP if achived by the use of the negotiated variable "windowsize". The term pipelined is really not the best one.
you can read more here:
http://www.vercot.com/~serva/advanced/TFTP.html
and it seems probably it's going to be an RFC
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-masotta-tftpexts-windowsize-opt/
windowsize negotiation requieres the agreement on both sides but Serva (1st link) does some tricks for getting something similar against a regular RFC-1350 TFTP client.
Related
ICE protocol was updated in RFC 8445. ICE lite predates that RFC. The details on ICE Lite in RFC 8445 is provided in Appendix A. It is very sketchy. However, way back in 2007, an attempt was made to formalize what ICE Lite was. That was in this draft RFC. It is fairly descriptive but some of the statements conflict those in RFC 8445. For example, RFC 8445 does allow for both peers to be ICE LITE while the draft document suggests otherwise.
Can someone point out the exceptions or corrections in the draft RFC on ICE LITE which will make it compatible with RFC 8445? Or point to a document that describes ICE LITE in more detail that the description in RFC 8445?
I am NOT using libnice but as there is no relevant tag on ICE, I used libnice hoping that users of libnice will have some info.
pion/ice has an option for ICE Lite. I did some things via trial and error, but here is what I learned along the way.
From RFC 8445 6.1.1. Determining Role
Both lite: The initiating agent that started the ICE processing MUST
take the controlling role, and the other MUST take the controlled
role. In this case, no connectivity checks are ever sent.
Rather, once the candidates are exchanged, each agent performs the
processing described in Section 8 without connectivity checks. It
is possible that both agents will believe they are controlled or
controlling. In the latter case, the conflict is resolved through
glare detection capabilities in the signaling protocol enabling
the candidate exchange. The state of ICE processing for each data
stream is considered to be Running, and the state of ICE overall
is Running.
I haven't found an extensive single place to learn about ICE Lite. But you can look at how pion/ice behaves, and happy to answer more individual questions!
UDP has one good feature - it is connectionless. But it has many bad features - packets can be lost, arrive multiple times, there is no packet sequence - packet 2 can arrive faster than 1. How to keep good and remove bad?. Is there any good implementations that provide reliable transport protocol on top of udp so that we are still conectionless but without mentioned problems. One example of what can be done with it is mosh.
What you describe as bad isn't really bad depending on the context.
For example UDP is used a lot in realtime streaming, delivery confirmation and resending is useless in this context.
That being said there are e few implementations that you might want to look at:
ENet (http://enet.bespin.org/)
RUDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_User_Datagram_Protocol)
UDT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP-based_Data_Transfer_Protocol)
I work in embedded context:
CoAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protocol) also implements a lot of these features, so its worth a look.
What is your reason for not choosing TCP?
Can we implement a mid-scale broadcasting (maybe upto few hundreds) over WebRTC by using a star topology.
Here a peer can take the role of a streaming server (and even be put in a server kind of setup from where more bandwidth is accessible).
Will this kind of setup not scale pretty well (as the central peer can take advantage of a server infrastructure, if needed); say for 100-200 users or even more?
Can we consider it a viable option than going with a dedicated MCU solution? Or, if you know can you point out its limitations?
Can somebody point me to any implementation code for this?
That would be quite difficult. I think that in theory you could pass stream from one peer connection to multiple other ones. That said even if it works, I really doubt it will work on any reasonable scale.
The best way is to use the MCU. You'll get a real star topology.
I can only suggest using our services - AddLive - http://www.addlive.com (usual disclaimer - I work there).
I'm trying to design an efficient communication protocol between a micro-controller on one side and an ARM processor on a multi-core TI chip on the other side through SPI.
The requirements for the needed protocol:
1 - Multi-session with queuing support, as I have multiple sending/receiving threads, so it will be more than one application using this communication protocol and I need the protocol to handle queuing these requests (I will keep holding the buffer if the transmission is queue but I just need the protocol to manage scheduling the queues).
2 - Works over SPI as an underlying protocol.
3 - Simple error checking.
In this thread: "Simple serial point-to-point communication protocol", PPP was a recommended option, however I see PPP does only part of the job.
I also found Light weight IP (LwIP) project featuring PPP over serial (which I assume that I can use it over SPI), so I thought about the possibility of utilizing any of the upper layers protocols like TCP/UDP to do the rest of the required jobs. Fortunately, I found TI including LwIP as part of their ethernet SW in the starterware package, which I assume to ease porting at least on the TI chip side.
So, my questions are:
1 - Is it valid to use LwIP for this communication scheme? Won't this introduce much overhead due to IP headers which are not necessary for a point to point (on the chip level) communication and kill the throughput?
2 - Will the TCP or any similar protocol residing in LwIP handle the queuing of transmission requests, for example if I request transmission through a socket while the communication channel is busy transmitting/receiving request for another socket (session) of another thread, will this be managed by the protocol stack? If so, which protocol layer manages it?
3 - Is their a more efficient protocol stack than LwIP, that meets the above requirements?
Update 1: More points to consider
1 - SPI is the only available option, I use it with available GPIOs to indicate to the master when the slave has data to send.
2 - The current implemented (non-standard) protocol uses DMA with SPI, and a message format of《STX_MsgID_length_payload_ETX》with a fixed message fragments length, however the main drawback of the current scheme is that the master waits for a response on the message (not fragment) before sending another one, which kills the throughput and does not utilise the full duplex nature of SPI.
3- An improvement to this point was to use a kind of mailbox for receiving fragments, so a long message can be interrupted by a higher priority one so that fragments of a single message can arrive non sequentially, but the problem is that this design lead to complicating things especially that I don't have much available resources for many buffers to use the mailbox approach on the controller (master) side. So I thought that it's like I'm re-inventing the wheel by designing a protocol stack for a simple point to point link which may not be efficient.
4- What kind of higher level protocols can be normally used above SPI to establish multiple sessions and solve the queuing/scheduling of messages?
Update 2: Another useful thread "A good serial communications protocol/stack for embedded devices?"
Update 3: I had a look at Modbus protocol, it seems to specify the application layer then directly the data link layer for serial line communication, which sounds to skip the unnecessary overhead of network oriented protocols layers.
Do you think this will be a better option than LwIP for the intended purpose? Also, is there a widely used open source implementation like LwIP but for Modbus?
I think that perhaps you are expecting too much of the humble SPI.
An SPI link is little more a pair of shift registers one in each node. The master selects a single node to connect to its SPI shift register. As it shifts in its data, the slave simultaneously shifts data out. Data is not exchanged unless the master explicitly clocks the data out. Efficient protocols on SPI involve the slave having something useful to output while the master inputs. This may be difficult to arrange, so you usually need a means of indicating null data.
PPP is useful when establishing a connection between two arbitrary endpoints, when the endpoints are fixed and known a priori, PPP would serve no purpose other than to complicate things unnecessarily.
SPI is not a very sophisticated nor flexible interface and probably unsuited to heavyweight general purpose protocols such as TCP/IP. Since "addressing" on SPI is performed by physical chip-select, the addressing inherent in such protocols is meaningless.
Flow control is also a problem with SPI. The master has no way of determining that the slave has copied the data from SPI the shift register before pushing more data. If your slave SPI supports DMA you would be wise to use it.
Either way I suggest that you develop something specific to your purpose. Since SPI is not a network as such, you only need a means to address threads on the selected node. This could be as simple as STX<thread ID><length><payload>ETX.
Added 27 September 2013 in response to comments
Generally SPI as its names suggests is used to connect to peripheral devices, and in that context the protocol is defined by the peripheral. EEPROMS for example typically use a common or at least compatible command interface across vendors, and SD/MMC card SPI interface uses a standardised command test and protocol.
Between two microcontrollers, I would imagine that most implementations are proprietary and application specific. Open protocols are designed for generic interoperability and to achieve that might impose significant unnecessary overhead for a closed system, unless perhaps the nodes were running a system that already had a network stack built in.
I would suggest that if you do want to use a generic network stack that you should abstract the SPI with device drivers at each end that give the SPI a standard I/O stream interface (open(), close(), read(), write() etc.), then you can use the higher-level PPP and TCP/IP protocols (although PPP can probably be avoided since the connection is permanent). However that would only be attractive if both nodes already supported these protocols (running Linux for example), otherwise it will be significant effort and code for little benefit, and would certainly not be "efficient".
I assume you dont really want or have room for a full ip (lwip) stack on the microcontroller? This just sounds like a lot of overkill. Why not just roll your own simple packet structure to move the data items you need to move. Depending on how spi is supported on both sides you may or may not be able to use it to define the frame for your data, if not a simple start pattern, length and a trailing checksum and maybe tail pattern would suffice for finding packet boundaries in the stream (no different than a serial/uart solution). You can even use the PPP solution for that with a start pattern and I think end pattern with the payload using a two byte pattern whenever the start pattern happens to show up in the data. I dont remember all the details now.
Whatever your frame is then add a packet type and your handshakes, or if the data is going to just be microcontroller to arm then you dont even need to do that.
To get back to your direct question. Yes, I think that an ip stack (lwip or other) will introduce a lot of overhead. both bandwidth and more important the amount of code needed to support that stack will chew up rom/ram on both sides. If you ultimately need to present this data in an ip fashion (a website hosted by the embedded system) then somewhere in the path you need an ip stack, etc.
I cant imagine that lwip manages your queues for you. I assume you would need to do that yourself. the various queues might want to talk to a single driver that deals with the single spi bus (assuming there is a single spi bus with multiple chip selects). It also depends on how you are using the spi interface, if you are allowing the arm to talk to multiple microcontrollers and the packets of data are broken up into a little bit from this controller a little from that controller so that nobody has to wait to long before they get a few more bytes of data. Or will a complete frame have to move from one microcontroller before moving onto the next gpio interrupt to pull that guys data? The long and short of it is I would assume you have to manage the shared resource just like you would in any other situation where you have multiple users of a shared resource (rtos, full blown operating system, etc). I dont remember lwip that well at all but with a full blown berkeley sockets application interface the user could write separate applications where each application only cared about one TCP or UDP port and the libraries and drivers managed separating those packets out to each application as well as all of the rules for the IP stack.
If you are not already doing experiments with moving data over the spi interface(s) I would start with simple experiments first just to get the feel for how well it is or isnt going to work, the sizes of transfers you can do reliably per spi transction, etc. Your solution may naturally just fall out of those experiments.
Are there any software libraries and/or wireless drivers that make it possible to turn a sequence of binary data into a wireless packet in the air? For example, if someone used Airpcap / Wireshark to capture a series of interesting packets, is there some library that can be fed that binary data in order to turn it back into 802.11 wireless packets for testing purposes? If so, can we then also make minor alterations to the values of the packet in order to generate a wide variety of testing scenarios? Is anyone aware of tools/libraries that enable or assist this scenario?
While there are many tools around that may be used to replay and send data, one of the most advanced and flexible one is:
TCPReplay
http://tcpreplay.synfin.net/
You can edit the packets at different levels and then to send them.
Excerpt from their website:
... You can ... classify traffic as client or server, rewrite Layer 2, 3 and 4 headers and finally replay ...
There are some alternatives such as bitTwist and the WinPcap library.
Most Wi-fi tools are set up for cracking networks or stealing data so you might be able to re-purpose an existing attacker's tool or library (like ettercap or aircrack-ng) for your testing purposes. Most tools I've encountered focus on ethernet, tcp and http.
The following list of software might merit further investigation:
TCPReplay
Bit-Twist
aircrack-ng suite
Nemesis
Packet Editor
Bit-Twist and TCPReplay are your best bet if you're willing to compromise for something higher up in the protocol stack.