The Forest Project

Introduction To The Forest Project

The Forest Project is an effort to demonstrate the complete development process for a new protocol targeted for the SPP (Superchared Planetlab Platform). As noted in the page Internet Scale Overlay Hosting, a typical Planetlab user wishing to develop a Fast-Path (FP) implementation of a new protocol will typically follow these broad steps:

1. Develop a slow-path version by writing a stylized socket program that captures the semantics of the protocol processing and debug it using almost any host.
2. Repeat the testing of the slow-path version of the router software on the SPPs' GPEs.
3. Send to the SPP developers information regarding the slow-path program that handles your new protocol (e.g., slow-path code, test results, informal/formal protocol description).
4. The SPP developers will transform the slow-path socket program into a slow-path part that will run on a GPE and a fast-path part that will run on an NPR.

In Step 4, the slow-path part typically handles the control path and exception processing; and the fast-path part handles the data path. Note that Step 1 can even be done using a single host if only attempting to eliminate gross functional bugs. As discussed in Development of the Forest Protocol , variations of the above steps can be profitably used.

History

A slow-path Forest implementation was first demonstrated at the GEC 6 Conference.

Wiki Pages

• The SPP Architecture
• The wunet Protocol
  • The Wunet Protocol
  • Inside The wunet Source Code
• Forest Pages
  • The Forest Protocol
  • Development Of The Forest Protocol
  • The GEC 6 Demo
    • The GEC 6 Forest Demo
    • Running The GEC 6 Forest Demo
  • Design Of The Forest Fastpath
• Related Pages
  • The GEC 6 Fastpath Demo