David Alvarez, Entry #3: Weeks 4-5

Each week here is getting more enjoyable, yet sadly goes by faster as well. I've been paired with the other high school student here, Rodda, to run a series of experiments on a WebRTC test setup. These are similar to the experiments I ran by myself before, except that now we have a third machine acting as a monitor and capturing packets in the stream between the sender and the receiver machines. The data is collected by two different pieces of software; a built-in upload option on the test setup, as well as Wireshark. The data that we get from here we then plot in several charts by two different means. The first is using a built-in graph generator on the test setup that we helped create. This plots five different metrics for both the sender and receiver; data rate, resolution, framewidth, packet loss, and round-trip time (RTT).

The key components of our experiments; a sender (out of camera), monitor machine, router, and receiver machine.

Rodda and I also created a Python script that can generate graphs for some of the other metrics that we couldn't get from the built-in tool; throughput, retransmission rates, and packet length. We also have to save the .pcap traces from Wireshark that show all of the packets captured during the experiment as well as all of their properties, which are found under the RadioTap Header. Over the weekend, I added a feature to the script that can generate .xml files, just in case Bart or Varun want better plots and want to modify the code themselves. We've also added another feature so that cumulative distribution function (CDF) graphs can be generated as well. In essence, most of what Rodda and I have been doing for the past two weeks can be boiled down to doing about a dozen trials, then plotting the data from it and putting it into a folder for Bart and Varun to analyze.

Examples of the types of graphs generated

Outside of the work being done, everything's been good. A visiting professor from the Netherlands is leaving us today, so we had a celebratory dinner for him yesterday. Dr. Venanzi visited me last week and got to meet Varun and learn about what exactly I'm doing in the lab, and I got to have lunch with her, Will, Sharanya, and Alex. It was nice to see everyone and catch up with what they were up to. I'm officially on the home stretch, with my last day being only two weeks from today. I'm excited to wrap up whatever work I can and hopefully finish my time here on a high note!