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Task 2: IP Forwarding Table Lookup

IP Forwarding Table Build and Lookup

One of the key tasks to accomplish for this project is to perform the fundamental thing that routers do: receive packets, match their destination addresses against a forwarding table, and forward them out the correct interface.

Build Forwarding Table

You will need to implement some kind of forwarding table, with each entry containing the following:

  1. A network prefix (e.g., 149.43.0.0),
  2. A network "mask" (e.g., 255.255.0.0),
  3. The "next hop" IP address, if the destination network prefix is not for a directly attached network, and,
  4. The network interface name through which packets destined to the given network should be forwarded.

You will need to build the forwarding table from two sources:

  • the list of router interfaces you get through a call to the net.interfaces() (or net.ports()) method
  • and by reading in the contents of a file named forwarding_table.txt.

An example forwarding table file is found in the project directory, and is also recreated each time you either run the test scripts or run your router in Mininet. Your code can simply assume that a file named forwarding_table.txt exists in the current working directory.

Note

Your forwarding table may be different for the test scenario and for Mininet to help ensure that your router behaves in a general way and isn't written just to handle a specific set of forwarding table entries

Note that for each interface object in the list obtained from net.interfaces() (or, equivalently, net.ports()), the IP address assigned to the interface and the network mask are available (see the Switchyard documentation on getting information about interfaces/ports).

The file forwarding_table.txt can be assumed to exist in the same directory where your router is starting up (again, this file is produced by the Switchyard test scenario or by the Mininet startup script), and is structured such that each line contains 4 space-separated items: the network address, the subnet mask, the next hop address, and the interface through which packets should be forwarded. Here are some example lines:

172.16.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.2 router-eth0
192.168.200.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.200.1 router-eth1

In the first line, the network address is 172.16.0.0 and the subnet mask is 255.255.0.0. The next hop IP address is 192.168.1.2, and the interface through which to forward packets is named router-eth0.

Match Destination IP Addresses against Forwarding Table

After you build the forwarding table (which should be done once, upon startup), destination addresses in IP packets received by the router should be matched against the forwarding table. Remember that in case of two items in the table matching, the longest prefix match should be used.

Two special cases to consider:

  1. If there is no match in the table, just drop the packet. (We'll handle this better in a later stage of creating the router.)
  2. If packet is for the router itself (i.e., destination address is an address of one of the router's interfaces), also drop/ignore the packet. (We'll also handle this better at a later stage.)

Coding

Your task is to implement the logic described above. The start file is named lab_4/myrouter.py.

There are a couple functions and methods in the Python 3's ipaddress library (also available through Switchyard's IP address library) that are helpful for building forwarding table entries and/or for matching destination IP addresses against forwarding table entries:

  • To find out the length of a subnet prefix, you can use the following code pattern:

    from switchyard.lib.address import *
netaddr = IPv4Network('172.16.0.0/255.255.255.0')
netaddr.prefixlen # -> 24

Note in the code above that you simply need to concatenate an IP address with '/' and the netmask when constructing a IPv4Network object. The resulting object can tell you the length of the prefix in bits, which will be quite helpful.

  • The IPv4Address class can be converted to an integer using the standard int() type conversion function. This function will return the 32-bit unsigned integer representation of an IP address. Remember that you can use bit-wise operations on Python integers (& is bitwise AND, | is bitwise OR, ~ is bitwise NOT, ^ is bitwise XOR). For example, if we wanted to check whether a given address matches a prefix, we might do something like this:

    prefix = IPv4Address('172.16.0.0')
destaddr = IPv4Address('172.16.23.55')
matches = (int(prefix) & int(destaddr)) == int(prefix)
# matches -> True

You can also use capabilities in the IPv4Network class to do the same thing:

prefixnet = IPv4Network('172.16.0.0/16')
# same as IPv4Network('172.16.0.0/255.255.0.0')
matches = destaddr in prefixnet
# matches -> True

✅ In the report, show how you implement the logic of building IP forwarding table and matching the destination IP addresses.

Testing

As the function has not been fully implemented, there is no test cases can check the output of your router.