frottle 0.2.1 review

Frottle (Freenet throttle) is a project to control traffic on wireless networks

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Marcus

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Frottle (Freenet throttle) is a project to control traffic on wireless networks. Such control eliminates the common hidden-node effect even on large scale wireless networks. Frottle is currently only available for Linux wireless gateways using iptables firewalls, with plans to develop a windows client in the future.

Frottle is made to schedule the traffic of each client, using a master node to co-ordinate actions. This eliminates collisions, and prevents clients with stronger signals from receiving bandwidth bias.

Frottle has been developed and tested on the large community wireless network of WaFreeNet. We have found running frottle has given us a significant improvment in the network usability. Testing results will be documented here as time permits.

Frottle currently operates as a userspace application, receiveing outbound packets via the iptables QUEUE functionality. Access to the network is controlled by the frottle master, sending each client a control packet (token) which contains information about how much data can be sent at this time.

Each client receives its token and sends any required data, one at a time. This eliminates collisions, and with a reasonable signal packetloss is virtually zero. Also, since each client gets a limited slice of the bandwidth, everyone can get fair access regardless of their signal strength. Whilst this mechanism does result in increased latency, overall network performance and utilisation can significantly increase.

Here are some key features of "frottle":
Traffic queues built in to frottle assign different, dynamic priorities to different traffic. Most traffic has a default priority. Traffic to/from specified ports (and ICMP packets) are made high priority. Traffic for connections that have done more than 2 MB of data and have a rate of more than 5 KB/s are made low priority. When a client is polled, high priority traffic is sent first, then default, then low until the poll quota is used.

Realtime info on each clients performance is available from the master in a html file and optionally at each client in a similar html file. (The names and locations of these files is set in /etc/frottle.conf.)