Computer Networking Lab weeks 6&7

Hi again, this is Sohan and I am working in a computer networking lab this summer at Columbia University.

These past 2 weeks have been more of the same. I have continued to run tests on the Orbit-lab, process the .pcap files using the Python scripts, and graph the results using the MATLAB scripts. Though it may seem monotonous and redundant, each time accessing the Orbit-lab presents its own adventure with its own unique challenges.

More recently, the nodes in the network are successfully uploading the requisite version of Ubuntu which solved one of my major problems before. However, other problems have occurred such as the nodes failing to communicate effectively with one another and sometimes the drivers not being installed properly (drivers are the device which helps the software communicate with the hardware and vice versa ex: the trackball on the older mouses interpreted the motion of the mouse and sent that information to the mouse driver which interpreted the signal and made the pointer on the screen move in the designated direction). In our case, the driver helps interpret the commands we are inputting and makes the hardware act accordingly ex. if we want the wlan card in the AP to release a signal of 18mbps, we input a command, the driver interprets the commands, and send a signal to the wlan device to release a signal of 18mbps. When the drivers are not installed properly, our commands may be ineffective and futile at points making the process of running the experiment very difficult. Nonetheless, there have been times where the Orbit-lab does in fact cooperate and work adequately and I have obtained data sets to analyze.

Also, over the past few weeks, Varun has had me debug/clean-up/develop the Python and MATLAB scripts. Some of the information previously had to be manually inputted such as the time/date and now, I have made them so that they can obtain the information directly from some of the files in our data sets. Similarly, since we use 2 Python scripts to process the .pcap files and one script is based off of the outputs of the previous script, I have made them more automated where the last script can retrieve the data from the text files outputted from the first script to make the process less complicated and help it run more smoothly.

Lastly, one of the members of the lab is leaving for Korea tomorrow. He will be starting graduate school in the fall at Michigan and will spend the rest of his summer at home in Korea. We had a nice little going away party for him this past week and at the same time welcomed a new member to our lab who will essentially take his place from China.

So far, work has been going well and hopefully, we have some more productive weeks ahead!