Building Your Own Routing Protocol

[paidforby]

Description

Routing protocols are all around you. Through a mess of radio waves, electrical signals, and flickering light, routing protocols determine how information gets from point A to point B. There are lots of analogies out there for how routing protocols work (think postal service p.s. SAVE the USPS!) and there are more routing protocols shooting around the interwebs than you may realize. But what if you don't want to use the traditional, (big I)nternet? What if your medium of communication is something so new and cutting edge, or so retro and outdated (let's call it vintage) that the commonly used standards don't apply. Or what if you just want to better understand how information moves through cyberspace? Where would you start?! You would start by building your own routing protocol.

By sharing my experience of writing a custom routing protocol for the disaster.radio project, I hope to shed light on the inner-workings of computer networks and encourage others explore the possibilities of alternative routing protocols. Together we can discuss how you would begin designing a protocol, the steps involved, and the questions that must be answered.

The Internet was built by humans with their own motives and inherent biases. You are humans too (probably) and you too can build your own internet by harnessing the power of routing protocols!

Type: streamed talk+discussion, possible ongoing online collaboration element
Length: 30mins talk, +30mins of discussion/demo of network simulator
Date: between August 7-9
Duration: once (for talk+discussion) possibly ongoing (I have and idea for creating a network simulator sand box could be hosted on a website, attendees would visit it, place nodes, send packets and see how they are routed, I have no idea if I can get this working by August, but it could be cool if I did)
Language: english

Objective

Key takeaways:

• Be able to answer the question ,"Why would anyone want to build their own routing protocol?"
• Be able to identify the features shared by most routing protocols (e.g. addresses, packets, headers, routing tables).
• Be able to identify specific styles of routing (e.g. distance vector, source-routing, proactive routing, reactive routing, dynamic routing, static routing)
• Learn what all of these acronyms mean, OSI, MAC, IP, TCP, UDP, AODV, DSDV, DSR, OSPF, RIP, EIGRP, BGP, EGP IS-IS, B.A.T.M.A.N., OLSR (jk, but we will define some of them).
• (Possibly) Build a simulated network using the disaster.radio network simulator (highly dependent of the progress on said simulator)

Material and Technical Requirements

Platform: videoconferencing
Technical considerations: No max number of participants for talk/discussion. There may need to be some considerations made for network simulator portion (but that is dependent on status of that project).

There's no prerequisite knowledge necessary, but if participants want to read ahead, the protocol for disaster radio is documented here,
https://github.com/sudomesh/disaster-radio/wiki/Protocol

There is also some interesting discussion about routing protocols in this issue thread,
sudomesh/disaster-radio#57

Presenter(s)

Name: Grant Gallo
Email: grant@peoplesopen.net
Url(s): disaster.radio, [peoplesopen.net](https://peoplesopen.net buildyourowninter.net.
GitHub: paidforby

Presenter Bio

Grant is a professional firmware developer and network engineer who spends his spare time hacking on microcontrollers, designing routing protocols, and (occasionally) shooting stop motion animations or making zines.