Narwhal: An IPv4 Core Routing Simulator

Rhodes University Honours Research 2012

Research Summary

The goal of this research is to simulate packet routing at an IPv4 datagram level on large scale, this refers to both depth of route, and amount of packets to be routed. As such, Narwhal was created to fulfil both these requirements.

Narwhal is setup by through configuration scripts generated by live network routing data, as generated by traceroute (UNIX). These configuration scripts hold all the processed data needed to build the routes for simulation. The simulator will then go about simulating packet routing requests through the use of libpcap, to sniff in-bound traffic, and libnet, to emit out-bound traffic to destined hosts.

This project is coded in C and is designed as a software only implementation targeted at an UNIX based system. This research serves as a proof of concept for further research in this field.