NETwork Home INTerference

...is a passive measurement tool for home network interference detection. It uses reliable sources of metrics that can be correlated to create an easily interpreted overview of whether the bottleneck in a connection exists on the local wireless network or not.

This tool was created as part of a master thesis. The report detailing the motivation, development, and features of it can be read in full in report.pdf.

Installation

The tool can be downloaded as follows:

git clone https://github.com/petternett/NETHINT.git

then, install the required Python libraries by running

cd NETHINT
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

After installing, the tool can be run by going into the src directory and running

sudo -E python3 main.py

All the available arguments can be seen by running sudo -E python3 main.py -h.

Listening to wireless traffic requires a wireless network interface card that is capable of running in Monitor mode. A guide on how to put an interface in Monitor mode can be found here.

Interface selection and pcap parsing

NETHINT is capable of either capturing live from an interface or read an existing pcap file. The available interfaces can be listen by running sudo -E python3 main.py -ls. The interface can be selected by index, like sudo -E python3 main.py [index]. If no index is supplied, it will pick one by itself.

Running modes

NETHINT has three modes depending on the type of input:

1. Wireless (default): Listen to wireless traffic
2. Local: Listen to traffic going in and out of a single wireless interface
3. Emulated: Listen to traffic that is emulated with Mininet and iPerf3.

To change the running mode, supply the program with either of the arguments --local, --emulated or --wireless. For emulated traffic, the IP addresses of the iPerf3 servers need to be put into a list in common.py called emulated_ip_list.

In wireless mode, the WLAN to listen to can be selected by SSID with the argument -s [SSID].

GUI

Export options

There are several ways of exporting data from NETHINT. One is by turning on logging with the optional flag -l [filename], which takes a filename as an optional argument. This will log packets with valid latency times, as well as information about other metrics to a JSON file.

Another way is through the GUI. The user can right-click inside a plot and choose "export", which will bring up a window where they can select to export as:

• Data as a CSV file
• Plot as a vector file (SVG)
• Plot as an image file (png, jpg, etc.)

Emulation

If you want to create your own emulated pcaps, the script used in our testing is in emulation/topo.py. It requires mininet, tc and xterm to be installed on your system. To run it, type

sudo mn --custom topo.py --topo [topology] --link tc

Once inside mininet, type the name of the name of the emulation you wish to run, for example

mininet> init_test

The [topology] argument is which emulated network topology you wish to use. Please see the emulation/topo.py for a list of pre-configured topologies and emulation functions.