Design And Implementation Of Emulation Platform For Underwater Network Protocol Based On Microservice Architecture

Underwater network technology plays an indispensable role in the exploration and exploitation of marine resources,and network simulation and emulation are important verification means for the study of underwater network technology.At present,the commonly used underwater acoustic network experimental platforms are NS2 and NS3,or are extended from them,such as Aqua-Sim,DESERT and SUNSET.These simulation or emulation platforms require users to be proficient in C++ programming because they integrate many complicated application programming interfaces(APIs)and design classes with high abstraction.At the same time,using the above platforms,the configuration process is cumbersome,the learning curve is steep,and the scalability is low.In addition,the learning curve of UnetStack,a JAVA-based UAN simulation and emulation platform,is complanate.However,due to the isolation of programming languages,UnetStack can't reuse the code of experimental platform based on NS2/NS3.A feasible way to reduce the use threshold of the platform is to reconstruct the platform.Without further optimizing these existing experimental platforms from the software architecture,it is often impossible for the protocol researchers to completely focus on the logic implementation of the protocol without paying attention to the design and implementation of the experimental software.The purpose of this paper is to solve the problem of existing UAN protocol simulation and emulation platform.Under the guidance of the design idea of microservice architecture(MSA),UAN protocol simulation and emulation platform is more modular,the development of protocols and functional modules is more flexible,the construction of network protocol stack and the implementation of experiments are more convenient.In this paper,the design concept of microservice architecture is discussed in depth and an experimental platform of UAN protocol based on microservice architecture,called MicroUAN,is designed and implemented.The proposed platform uses message queue,Rabbit MQ,as the communication component between microservices.The programming framework of protocol microservices based on hierarchical state machine is implemented and protocol researchers can implement various underwater acoustic network protocols in this programming framework.Based on this platform,many common underwater network protocols have been implemented,including UDP,DSDV,UW-Aloha and so on.The protocol microservices are constructed into a complete underwater network protocol stack through configuration file.This platform integrates a series of functional microservices,such as routing table tracking microservices,data flow generation microservices,analog underwater acoustic channel microservices,etc.The proposed platform achieves the access of different types of underwater acoustic modems to support emulations based on real underwater acoustic channels.Based on MicroUAN,the author using complete protocol stack to carry out networking communication experiments of multiple underwater nodes in the pool.At the same time,the hardware resource consumption of the NS3,an experimental platform based on monolithic architecture,is compared with that of the proposed platform through experiments.