XIA GENI Tutorial
NOTE: This tutorial was given at the GENI conference at Indiana University on Oct 21, 2014. The code used in this tutorial is quite old, but can still be found in the tutorial branch of the repository. Because the tutorial was specific to the GENI environment, there is a fair amount of information on how to use GENI included.
In this tutorial, you will configure and run an XIA network and add a new XIA principal type that provides limited load-balancing support.
We walk you through setting up a simple 5 node topology and then running a simple file transfer across the network. We show how XIA enables opportunistic file caching using Content Identifiers (CIDs) by fetching the same content from (now populated) content caches within the network. We'll see how these transfers work in detail by examining packets on the wire.
In the second segment of this tutorial we'll look at extending XIA with a new principal type (method of communication) that allows load-balancing within the network. We show that supporting a new means of communication can be accomplished in XIA by modifying < 20 lines of code on a single node in the network. We use this example as a springboard for discussing using XIA as a platform in your research.
The XIA source code and rspec used for this tutorial can be found at the following locations:
Notes: Normally XIA hosts and ADs are assigned random cryptographically assigned identifiers. To make things easier in the tutorial, we are using demo configurations with easy to read identifiers.
Other XIA resources
- XIA Home Page
- See the XIA README for more information