Introduction

Rattan is a fast and extensible Internet path emulator framework.

We provide a simple and easy-to-use API to create and manage network emulations. Rattan is designed to be used in a wide range of scenarios, from testing network applications to debugging complex network performance issues.

Our modular design makes it easy to extend Rattan with different network effects or conditions. We provide a set of built-in modules that can be used to emulate different network conditions, such as bandwidth, latency, packet loss, ISP policies and etc.

We support Linux only at the moment. Currently, kernel version v5.4, v5.15, v6.8 and v6.11 are tested.

Design Targets

• High Performance. Rattan provides both high peak performance and execution efficiency.
• Flexible. Rattan tries to be agnostic of the underlying path emulation model.
• Extensible. Rattan provides rich features out-of-the-box, meanwhile tends to be easily extensible for custom conditions.
• User-Friendly. Rattan aims to provide a simple and intuitive interface for quick usage on common cases and ensure complete controllability under the hood to cover the corner as well.

Basic Concepts

Run rattan will generate some network namespaces and veth pairs to emulate the network environment. The network topology is like:

   ns-left                                                           ns-right
+-----------+ [Internet]                               [Internet] +-----------+
|    vL0    |    |                 ns-rattan                 |    |    vR0    |
|  external | <--+          +---------------------+          +--> |  external |
|   vL1-L   |               |  vL1-R  [P]   vR1-L |               |   vR1-R   |
| .1.1.x/32 | <-----------> |.1.1.2/32   .2.1.2/32| <-----------> | .2.1.x/32 |
|   vL2-L   |               |  vL2-R        vR2-L |               |   vR2-R   |
| .1.2.y/32 | <-----------> |.1.2.2/32   .2.2.2/32| <-----------> | .2.2.y/32 |
~    ...    ~   Veth pairs  ~  ...           ...  ~   Veth pairs  ~    ...    ~
+-----------+               +---------------------+               +-----------+

Then Rattan will build and link the cells according to the configuration file. Each cell emulates some network characteristics, such as bandwidth, delay, loss, etc.

ATTENTION: Check firewall settings before running Rattan CLI. Please make sure you allow the following addresses:

• 10.1.1.0/24
• 10.2.1.0/24

For example, you can run the following commands if using ufw:

• ufw allow from 10.1.1.0/24
• ufw allow from 10.2.1.0/24

Contributing

Rattan is free and open source. You can find the source code on GitHub and issues and feature requests can be posted on the GitHub issue tracker. Rattan relies on the community to fix bugs and add features: if you'd like to contribute, please read the CONTRIBUTING guide and consider opening a pull request.