NEATPy Documentation

This is the documentation for NEATPy: a transport system conforming to the specification of a transport system specified by the TAPS WG. While written in Python, it utilizes the NEAT codebase with the help of language bindings created by SWIG. In this way this transport system is logically divided in a front-end and back-end; the Python front-end presents a standards conforming API to the end user, while under the hood, it uses NEAT to handle all protocol machinery.

Missing implementation details:

The implementation of NEATPy is mostly based on version 4 and 5 of the interface draft by the TAPS. It implements all major objects, actions and events. However some implementations details are left out. The reason for this, is that successful implementation of these would require changes to NEAT, which was outside the scope of the thesis:

  • Selection Properties:

Interface Instance or Type

Provisioning Domain Instance or Type

Use Temporary Local Address

  • Connection Properties:

Retransmission Threshold Before Excessive Retransmission Notification

Connection Group Transmission Scheduler

  • Events:

Soft Errors

Excessive retransmissions

  • Security Parameters:

    NEATPy provides secure connections, with TLS/TCP | DTLS/UDP | DTLS/SCTP, but further customization, as specified in the interface draft is not implemented, due to constraints in NEAT. For the transport system to be fully security-conformant, further implementation of security within NEAT is needed.

  • Rendezvous Action:

    Currently, the TAPS description is not very clear, and the full specification for the action is yet to be finalized.

Deviations:

  • Preconnection.start():

    The method is added to fulfill the methods Preconnection.initiate() and Preconnection.listen(), which respectively returns a Connection and Listener. The reason for this addition to NEATPy’s interface is to facilitate the start of the event loop running in the within NEAT. This function starting the event loop does not return. To be able to return Connection and Listener objects this method is needed to start the transport system and with it the event loop.

API documentation

Examples