2008-09-16 Tweaking TCP

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Summary: For the Telis project, we use the TCP protocol for the radio uplink. This is rather unusual since most other balloon flight projects use UDP and use . . .

Changed:

< Now what we probably also want, is a way to find out how many resends will occur if the radio uplink fails temporarily. We'd probably want to be gentle and not resend too much since the uplink is pretty limited bandwidth-wise.

to

> Now what we probably also want, is a way to find out how many resends will occur if the radio uplink fails temporarily. We'd probably want to be gentle and not resend too much since the uplink is pretty limited bandwidth-wise. I have found a way to check this per application (man tcp, search for TCP_INFO) but not per interface.


For the Telis project, we use the TCP protocol for the radio uplink. This is rather unusual since most other balloon flight projects use UDP and use their own retransmission and sequencing algorithms.

It has worked well for us previously, but we want to have more insight and diagnostics in a flight situation. Also, there's a backup function present in the software that's running on the PC104 on the balloon. Normally, it's not switched on and we'd like to automatically switch it on when a transmission occurs.

To gain more insight in the quality of the radio uplink, we think iptraf will do fine. A screenshot with the detailed statistics for an interface:

 - Statistics for eth0 ---------------------------
                Total      Total    Incoming   Incoming    Outgoing   Outgoing
              Packets      Bytes     Packets      Bytes     Packets      Bytes
  Total:         3142     621643        1665     131825        1477     489818
  IP:            3142     577645        1665     108505        1477     469140
  TCP:           2903     548408        1434      79900        1469     468508
  UDP:            238      29201         230      28569           8        632
  ICMP:             0          0           0          0           0          0
  Other IP:         1         36           1         36           0          0
  Non-IP:           0          0           0          0           0          0
  Total rates:         51.7 kbits/sec        Broadcast packets:          222
                       30.4 packets/sec      Broadcast bytes:          31189
  Incoming rates:       9.2 kbits/sec
                       15.8 packets/sec
                                             IP checksum errors:           0
  Outgoing rates:      42.5 kbits/sec
                       14.6 packets/sec

Note the IP checksum errors. This one would be pretty interesting for us.

Now what we probably also want, is a way to find out how many resends will occur if the radio uplink fails temporarily. We'd probably want to be gentle and not resend too much since the uplink is pretty limited bandwidth-wise. I have found a way to check this per application (man tcp, search for TCP_INFO) but not per interface.

A nice thing to use for testing purposes is Netem, the Linux in-kernel packet mangling software.