nwaku/apps/liteprotocoltester

Waku - Lite Protocol Tester

Aim

Testing reliability of light client protocols in different scale. Measure message delivery reliability and latency between light push client(s) and a filter client(s) node(s).

Concept of testing

A tester node is configured either 'publisher' or 'receiver' and connects to a certain service node. All service protocols are disabled except for lightpush client or filter client. This way we would like to simulate a light client application. Each publisher pumps messages to the network in a preconfigured way (number of messages, frequency) while on the receiver side we would like to track and measure message losses, mis-ordered receives, late arrived messages and latencies. Ideally the tester nodes will connect to different edge of the network where we can gather more result from mulitple publishers and multiple receivers.

Publishers are fill all message payloads with information about the test message and sender, helping the receiver side to calculate results.

Phases of development

Phase 1

At the first phase we aims to demonstrate the concept of the testing all boundled into a docker-compose environment where we run one service (full)node and a publisher and a receiver node. At this stage we can only configure number of messages and fixed frequency of the message pump. We do not expect message losses and any significant latency hence the test setup is very simple.

Further plans

• Add more configurability (randomized message sizes, usage of more content topics and support for static sharding).
• Extend collected metrics and polish reporting.
  • Add test metrics to graphana dashboard.
• Support for static sharding and auto sharding for being able to test under different conditions.
• ...

Usage

Phase 1

Lite Protocol Tester application is built under name liteprotocoltester in apps/liteprotocoltester folder.

Starting from nwaku repository root:

make liteprotocoltester
cd apps/liteprotocoltester
docker compose build
docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f receivernode

Configure

Environment variables for docker compose runs

Variable	Description	Default
NUM_MESSAGES	Number of message to publish	120
DELAY_MESSAGES	Frequency of messages in milliseconds	1000
PUBSUB	Used pubsub_topic for testing	/waku/2/default-waku/proto
CONTENT_TOPIC	content_topic for testing	/tester/1/light-pubsub-example/proto

Lite Protocol Tester application cli options

Option	Description	Default
--test_func	separation of PUBLISHER or RECEIVER mode	RECEIVER
--service-node	Address of the service node to use for lightpush and/or filter service	-
--num-messages	Number of message to publish	120
--delay-messages	Frequency of messages in milliseconds	1000
--pubsub-topic	Used pubsub_topic for testing	/waku/2/default-waku/proto
--content_topic	content_topic for testing	/tester/1/light-pubsub-example/proto
--cluster-id	Cluster id for the test	0
--config-file	TOML configuration file to fine tune the light waku node Note that some configurations (full node services) are not taken into account	-
--nat	Same as wakunode "nat" configuration, appear here to ease test setup	any
--rest-address	For convenience rest configuration can be done here	127.0.0.1
--rest-port	For convenience rest configuration can be done here	8654
--rest-allow-origin	For convenience rest configuration can be done here	*
--log-level	Log level for the application	DEBUG
--log-format	Logging output format (TEXT or JSON)	TEXT

Docker image notice

Please note that currently to ease testing and development tester application docker image is based on ubuntu and uses the externally pre-built binary of 'liteprotocoltester'. This speeds up image creation. Another dokcer build file is provided for proper build of boundle image.