README

This is part of a term project in Computer Networks, IIT Kharagpur Spring 2018.

DTP : Datagram transmission protocol.
The library is intended only for GNU / Linux.

Generating executables :
Use GNU make :
`$ make dtp # Creates shared object library.`
`$ make server client # Creates test programs for server and client sides.`

# If `make dtp` fails, try upgrading your kernel / GNU make.

Test operation :
*** Server side ***
$ ./server <port_no>

*** Client side ***
$ ./client <server_ip> <server_port> <filename>

DTP is a connection oriented protocol between two hosts.

The server and client must both create so called "gates"
to communicate, by making corresponding objects and then
calling init_dtp_server / client on these objects.
See include/gate.h for more details about the API.

While creating a dtp_server(), the port number must be provided
on which the server listens.
While creating a dtp_client(), the port number and the IP address
must be provided of the server to which the client wants to connect.

Once gates are created, the server must call dtp_listen()
while the client must call dtp_connect() to establish a connection.

For simplicity of implementation, a DTP server only connects
to one client at a time. The TCP - like variant can be
implemented by the user if needed on top of DTP.
If multiple connect() requests overlap, none of the clients
receive are connected.

Once the connection is established, the gates behave identically.
At this point, the buffers and threads are initialized.
There can be a bidirectional transfer of data.

The application can then call dtp_send() / dtp_recv()
to send / get streams of bytes.
The dtp_send() call blocks only if the buffer of packets is full.
The dtp_recv() waits for at least one byte to be available on
the receiver buffer

The buffers are implemented using a large circular array
(4MiB * 2 of data for every gate created.)
This was tested to be good enough for sending files as large as
150MiB from LBS to wherever CIC / CSE dept server is located with an approx speed
of 10MiB/s, even while the window size reached full capacity
and triple duplicate ACKs were detected subsequently
(which is suggestive of congestion within KGP.)
To view module specific debug data / trace such as these,
#define DTP_DEBUG / PACKET_TRACE in the corresponding files inside
src/*.c and `make` again.
Circular arrays were chosen over linked lists, because using
indexed window frames allows for easily accepting
out of order packets (upto a certain limit.)

close() closes the connection by sending a FIN packet, and waiting
for the ACK with the same sequence number.
If the gate has already received a FIN packet, close() sends out
another FIN packet, and destroys the gate.

src/daemons.c implements sender and receiver lightweight
processes using POSIX threads.
They keep monitoring state information of the gate,
and send constructed packets, reconstruct received packets as
per the current window size.
For synchronization and mutual exlusion, POSIX semaphores :
`pthread_cond_t` and mutexes : `pthread_mutex_t` have been used.

src/packet.c introduces helper functions for ease of construction
and transfer of packets through the created internal socket.