eBPF-Assisted Relays for Media-Streaming

This repository contains eBPF programs that allow kernel-space forwarding of packets for a decrease in forwarding delay. This approach avoids immediate user-space processing and delays it until after a packet was forwarded. For this we use the TC hook point for BPF both on ingress and egress side.

Contents

The repository contains, aside from the eBPF programs, also application level implementations of server, relay and client side (within src/go/examples), as well as shell scripts that allow for easy setup, testing and analysis. The examples contain a chat example where messages are kernel-forwarded and a video example where a video stream is created using gstreamer and kernel-forwarded. There is also a "proof-of-concept" example that just shows that forwarding from ingress to egress still triggers the egress eBPF program. A special performance analysis implementation of the application layer is also provided such that there is no need to actually transmit video data but mock-data is sent instead.

Set up the namespaces

• Go into the directory src/shell/
• Run the following commands to set up the bridges and namespaces:
  sudo sh ser-rel-bridge.sh
sudo sh rel-cli-bridge.sh
• After the bridges and namespaces have been set up you can test the setup by executing the following command:
  sudo sh test-setup.sh
• In case you want to use grafana for the same ip that is used in our code you need to run:
  sudo sh add_db_ip.sh

Enter a namespace and run the corresponding application layer program

• To enter a certain namespace you need to execute the following command from within the directory src/go/examples/priority_drop_video:
  sudo sh start_scripts/(server|relay|client)_start.sh
• After that you can run the program using:
  source execute.sh

After program is done running clean up potential left-overs

• To clean up potential left-overs after running an application layer program that used kernel-forwarding run:
  source delete.sh

This, for example, removes all used eBPF programs that have been hooked to TC.