Download Centralized system for managing Netem configurations

36
5
Conclusions
Once there was a subject for the work – a software for managing network emulation
configurations in a virtual Internet – the first step was to decide how to approach the
problem.
An approach was chosen that would involve writing a custom protocol that connects a
central server to multiple agents hosted on the network. Over many iterations, the
protocol changed from a text-based synchronous protocol with many options, into a
text-based asynchronous protocol with very few options.
It was a good choice to move away from more options to less options. If one goes to
the length of writing a custom protocol, then it would make little sense to make it
broader than the solution requires.
This idea could have been taken even further. From purely pragmatic point of view a
synchronous protocol would have sufficed in this case. The amount of traffic between
the nodes is relatively small and does not necessarily warrant an asynchronous
protocol and the pitfalls that it introduces (see 4).
For purely practical purposes, there is no need for a custom protocol. Any number of
existing RPC protocols or simply an HTTP server on each client would be enough.
But this conclusion can be taken as a result in itself.