AWANTA (Adaptive Software-Defined Wide Area Network framework for Telehealth Access) performs inter-domain network transfers for telehealth, in a network latency-aware manner.

Architecture

graph TD
    subgraph Edge_Node ["Edge Node (Client)"]
        MC[Measurements Client]
        CR[Cloud Router]
        EM[Event Manager]
    end

    subgraph Infrastructure ["Cloud Infrastructure"]
        AMQ[ActiveMQ Broker]
    end

    subgraph Control_Plane ["SD-WAN Controller"]
        SC[Ryu Controller]
        ETM[Event Trace Manager]
    end

    subgraph Analytics ["Analytics & Visualization"]
        GF[Goldfish]
    end

    RA[RIPE Atlas] -- "Network Metrics" --> MC
    RA -- "Historical Data" --> GF
    MC -- "Performance Data" --> CR
    MC -- "State Updates" --> EM
    EM -- "STOMP Events" --> AMQ
    AMQ -- "Real-time Telemetry" --> ETM
    ETM -- "Network State" --> SC
    SC -- "Flow Rules" --> Edge_Node

    click GF "https://github.com/KathiraveluLab/Goldfish" "Goldfish Repository"

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Modules

measurements_client

The Measurements Client is based on RIPE Atlas and RIPE Atlas Tools.

Installation and Configuration

1. System Dependencies
The Mininet emulator relies on OS-level networking binaries (like mnexec). Before setting up the python environment, install Mininet on your host machine. For Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mininet

2. Python Environment
To set up the full AWANTA Python environment (which includes dependencies for the emulator, controller, and measurements client), we recommend using a virtual environment and executing the provided setup script. The script automatically handles tricky dependencies for the SDN controller on modern Python versions:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
./setup_env.sh

Configuring the Measurements Client

To use the measurements client, you always need to configure your API key. (Note: The tools are already installed if you ran the full setup above).

ripe-atlas configure --set authorisation.create=<YOUR_API_KEY>

Note: This command saves your API key securely to ~/.config/ripe-atlas-tools/rc.

If you only want to run the measurements client on a machine without the rest of the AWANTA components, you can install just those tools:

1. Install the tools: pip install ripe-atlas-tools
2. Configure your API key: ripe-atlas configure --set authorisation.create=<YOUR_API_KEY>

The MeasurementsClient.py will then automatically use that configuration to execute measurements.

cloud_router

A decentralized cloud router in all the client nodes.

event_manager

Propagates the changes in measurements as events to a broker.

controller

The Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) Controller builds on top of Ryu.

Running AWANTA

AWANTA can be run using the provided Mininet emulation environment and the Ryu SDN controller. A complete execution involves running both the topology and the controller.

For detailed instructions and prerequisites, please refer to the Emulator README.

Quick Start

First, ensure your virtual environment is set up and all requirements are installed.

1. Start the Mininet Emulator: Run the topology script with sudo privileges to instantiate the network. Since sudo resets the path, use the virtual environment's Python executable directly:

   sudo .venv/bin/python modules/emulator/run_topology.py -topo full_mesh_topology

2. Start the Ryu Controller: In a separate terminal, activate the virtual environment and launch the Ryu controller to handle the flow rules and network routing based on the latency data.

   source .venv/bin/activate
   ryu-manager --observe-links modules/emulator/controller.py

Citing AWANTA

If you use AWANTA in your research, please cite the below paper:

• Caballero, E. S., Ramirez, J., Alisetti, S. V., Almario, S., and Kathiravelu, P. Network Measurements for Telehealth Optimizations. Understanding Internet Paths in Remote Regions. In Cluster Computing – The Journal of Networks Software Tools and Applications (CLUSTER). June 2025, Volume 28, Issue 6, Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-024-05069-z

• Kathiravelu, P., Bhimireddy, A., and Gichoya, J. Network Measurements and Optimizations for Telehealth in Internet's Remote Regions. In the Tenth IEEE International Conference on Software Defined Systems (SDS-2023). pp. 39-46, October 2023. https://doi.org/10.1109/SDS59856.2023.10329044.