Looking for a multiagent payload transport simulation RL environments - simulation

Hi I'm looking for any multiagent payload transport environments publicly available for experimentation, like the one shown here https://youtu.be/7gE_n6b5-LM
Any similar environments where the agents are required to collectively act to transport an object are also very much appreciated. TIA.

Related

Eclipse milo - Performance/scalability when deploying an OPCUA server in the cloud

I have created an OPCUA server with eclipse milo that is installed in the same machine where the clients are installed, so the communication works fast and reliably.
I did a bit of sniffing with wireshark to see how much communication involves under the hood and apparently there is a lot going on when monitoring variable, alarms, etc....
So I am thinking what issues I may expect in terms of performance and scalability if the server gets deployed in the cloud. I have seen that people talks about OPCUA cloud services, but not being this a hot topic is hard to foresee what challenges may come, and how well it scales and performs.
I would imagine that OPCUA uses sticky sessions, which means that you only can support a max number of users/requests, so dynamic scaling may not be an alternative right?
I tried the samples provides by eclipse milo, which are stored somewhere in the network, and it took long timeto connect to it. If that is the performance one may expect then the perception of the service for non-technical users would be that it does not work well.
Is the cloud a right place to use OPCUA considering the network overhead? Any recommendation to stick to local networks (intranet) only and skip the cloud?
Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks!
If you wanted to get into more detail and share Wireshark captures we might be able to go over parameters that would reduce traffic.
If bandwidth is a concern because you're using cellular or other constrained connections then sure, OPC UA may not be the best fit.
I'm curious what kind of delays or latency you experienced running the examples - connecting over the internet generally does not take very long, so perhaps you were also measuring the time it took to compile and start the example or there was something going on with your network.

SIP and RTP in VoLTE

I am investigating the SIP signaling and RTP media in VoLTE traffic. I can see RTP header but was told that the RTP payload and the SIP packets are all encrypted in IPsec. Is this true? If yes, at what interface I can see the decrypted packets?
Thanks.
LTE is based on IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) which is a very broad and encompassing set of specifications for an architectural framework that enables multimedia communication between IP connected end points.
Because it is so broad and all encompassing there are actually many different security points and interfaces - for example there are security specs for communication between an access network connected device (such as a mobile phone) and the core, for communication between different nodes within a single core network, for communication between different operator's or organisation's core networks etc.
3GPP and LTE build on the IMS specs and include specific security specs for the Mobile world also. There is a 3GPP spec which looks at access security for IMS (3GPP TS 33.203) and it includes the following diagram:
Each of the numbers in the diagram above is a different security 'association' and the above standard references one or more specifications for each one.
The result of all this security complexity and these many security layers is that the answer to your question depends on the point in the network you are looking at. For example, if you intercept the traffic between the phone and the base station you will not be able to see anything as it will all be encrypted at a lower layer (notwithstanding the latest GSM/3G security hacks etc). Similarly if you are looking at the traffic between the core network nodes or between different networks this may be over IPSEC tunnels etc and again you will not be able to see it.
If your aim is to intercept and eavesdrop on VoLTE voice calls then you are going to find this very hard as many of the above mechanisms are designed to prevent this - I won't say it is impossible as I'm sure someone will reference a hack or a 'government backdoor' example for similar technology etc.
If your interest is academic, or in profiling the performance of the network etc then you may be able to achieve what you want using one of the open source IMS solutions - e.g. http://www.openimscore.org.
Or, if you are working for, or with, one of the network equipment vendors then you may be in a position to insert or leverage network management and/or OSS 'hooks' or mechanisms which allow you gather info from some unencrypted data at certain points in the end to end flow.

how high frequency trading system connects to exchange

I'm trying to study about high frequency trading systems. Whats the mechanism that HFT use to connect with the exchange and whats the procedure (does it has to go through a broker or is it direct access, if it's direct access what sort of connection information that i require)
Thanks in advance for your answers.
Understand that there are two different "connections" in an HFT engine. The first is the connection to a market data source. The second is to a clearing resource. As mentioned in kpavlov's answer, a very expensive COLO (co-location) is needed to get as close to the data source/target as possible. Depending on their nominal latency these COLO resources cost thousands of dollars per month.
With both connections, your trading engine must be certified by the provider (ICE, CME, etc) to comply with their requirements. With CME the certification process is automated, with ICE it employs human review. In any case, the certification requires that your software demonstrate conformance to standards and freedom from undesirable network side effects.
You must also subscribe to your data source(s) and clearing service, neither is inexpensive and pricing varies over a pretty wide range. During the subscription process you'll gain access to the service providers technical data specification(s)-- a critical part of designing your trading engine. Using old data that you find on the Internet for design purposes is a recipe for problems later. Subscription also gets you access to the provider(s) test sites. It is on these test sites that you test and debug your engine.
After you think you engine is ready for deployment you begin connecting to the data/clearing production servers. This connection will get you into a place of shadows-- port roulette. Not every port at the provider's network edge has the same latency. Here you'll learn that you can have the shortest latency yet seldom have orders filled first. Traditional load balancing does little to help this and CME has begun deployment of FPGA-based systems to ensure correct temporal sequencing of inbound orders, but it's still early in its deployment process.
Once you're running you then get to learn that mistakes can be very expensive. If you place an order prior to a market pre-open event the order is automatically rejected. Do it too often and the clearing provider will charge you a very stiff penalty. Other things can also get you penalized or even kicked-off the service if your systems are determined to be implementing strategies to block others from access, etc.
All the major exchanges web sites have links to public data and educational resources to help decide if HFT is "for you" and how to go about it.
It usually requires an approval from exchange to grant access from outside. They protect their servers by firewalls so your server/network need to be authorized to access.
Special certification procedure with technician (by phone) is usually required before they authorize you.
Most liquidity providers use FIX protocol or custom APIs. You may consider starting implementing your connector with QuickFix, but it may become a bottleneck later, when your traffic will grow.
Information you need to access by FIX is:
Server IP
Server port
FIX protocol credentials:
SenderCompID
TargetCompID
Username
Password
Other fields

Horizontal scalability for distributed apps, how to achieve that?

I would like to disregard web applications here, because to scale them horizontally, ie to use multiple server instances together, it is "sufficient" to just duplicate the server software over the machines and just use a sort of router that forwards requests to the "less busy" server machine.
But what if my server application allows users to engage together in realtime ?
If the response to the request of a certain client X depends on the context of a client Y whose connection is managed by another machine then "inter machines" communication is needed.
I'd like to know the kind of "design solutions" that people has used in such cases.
For example, the people at Facebook must have already encountered such situation when enabling the chat feature of their social app.
Thank you in advance for any advise.
One solution to achive that is to use distibuted caches like memcache (Facebook also uses that aproach).
Then all the information which is needed on all nodes is stored in that cache (and a database if it needs to be permanent) an so all nodes can access that information (with a very small latency between the nodes).
regards
You should consider some solutions that provide transparent horizontal database scalability and guarantee ACID semantics. There are many solutions that offer this at various levels. People at Facebook which you reference have solved the problem by accepting eventual consistency but your question leads me to believe that you can't accept eventual consistency.

REST for low latency messaging .

why dont you see more people using REST architecture for client server system. You see people using sockets, or TIBCO RV or EMS or MQ but i haven't seen much basic REST architecture
does anyone know any reason why you would avoid using this architecture for client / server communication for high through put / low latency
REST is not a good fit for every problem.
REST is best for Resource management. If you are writing web services (as with a client-server system) then you find you want things like language-agnostic data representation, argument validation, client/server code generation, error handling, access controls. REST basically requires you to code those things yourself.
On the other hand, it adds the HTTP layer. You get seamless integration of proxies, caching etc, but you do lose some speed due to HTTP headers, the webserver frontend, etc.
I don't know that I would necessarily avoid it but I can think of a couple of reasons why I might not choose it for a high through-put, low latency service. First, you have to deal with the entire web stack to get your message to your service. This could introduce a number of unnecessary layers and services that would delay messages. A custom service need only support the protocol layers required by the service itself.
Second, unless your service is the only service hosted on the web server, you'll be competing with other requests for your messages to be serviced. While having a custom endpoint for your service may not solve all resource contention problems, at least you don't have to compete for access from other services to your endpoint.
Third, a custom protocol need only support the actual service-related protocol information and may result in smaller packet sizes because you don't need to support the additional HTTP protocol overhead. This would particularly effect protocols that exchange small messages as the header information would be a larger fraction of the message size.