Crowsnest is a research SDN application developed at Lancaster Unviersity. Crowsnest facillitates the collection of QoE metrics for Video on Demand content in OpenFlow enabled networks.
Crowsnest is built with Python and targets version 2.7. It has only been tested in Unix environments, and no promises are made for its stability. It is very much a work in progress.
2 tools are necessary to run crowsnest: Python 2.7 and MongoDB v2.x.
Everything else should be handled by running the following from the root of the project directory:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Some installations of Python 2.7 do not ship with pip by default, so if
which pip doesn't return a result, visit the Python project homepage for
instructions on how to install pip.
Crowsnest can be started with its default configuration, or it can be ran with a user specified configuration file in situations where port mappings overlap with other services on a machine.
Basic
./start
With Configuration
./start --config examples/config/node.yaml
./start -h to see all available options
The configuration file examples/config/default.yaml provides an example of
all available configuration options, and is merely for documentation. There is
no need to run crowsnest with this file.
You do not need to include options you do not wish to change.
To collect metrics, traffic must be sent to the machine running crowsnest by
whatever means you desire. We include a simple packet duplication rule to be
installed on an OF switch in the examples/sdn/ directory. If you read
TESTING.md, we provide a walkthrough of how we use this SDN rule.
Once crowsnest is running and receiving packets, you can retrieve and observe the data through the GUI or the API.
By default, the GUI binds to 0.0.0.0:80, and provides graphical access to all ongoing and completed sessions.
The API, by default, binds to 0.0.0.0:5000. Using the interface as detailed in
API.md, it is possible to retrieve data as it is stored on the local machine
as JSON.