Ulegene - A flexible user-space encapsulator for Linux
Description
Ulegene is a (userspace) program for encapsulating network packets or ethernet frames using, for example, Unidirectional Lightweight Encapsulation (ULE, RFC 4326). It was initially created for supporting the implementation and testing of new encapsulation formats and ULE extensions.
Currently, the primary application for Ulegene is the transport of IP/IPv6 packets over MPEG-2 Transport Streams using ULE or Multi-protocol Encapsulation (MPE).
What Ulegene does
The following paragraph sketches the typical operation of Ulegene.On startup, Ulegene creates a virtual network device (aka tunnel device). It also configures some network parameters for this network interface, if not in bridging mode(e.g. the IP address, network mask, etc.). Data received on the device is passed to the active encapsulation module which in turn encapsulates and forwards it to the multiplexer. The multiplexer takes as inputs various data streams and combines them into one stream of data. This final stream is fed to the output device.
It is also possible to use the network device in bridged networks, if this is supported by the underlying encapsulation method. E.g. ULE can do bridging. MPE has no possibility to encapsulate complete ethernet frames, so it is not capable of performing bridging as understood by Ulegene.
Features
- Generic encapsulation framework (can be used for different types of encapsulations)
- Modules are available for Multi-protocol Encapsulation (MPE), Unidirectional Lightweight Encapsulation (ULE) and Generic Stream Encapsulation (GSE)
- IP to NPA address mapping support
- All options can be specified via configuration files (see here for an example)
- Arbitrary TS streams (e.g. from an ASI input device or other processes) can also be included in the multiplex
- Includes DVB-S2 Base-band multiplexer which supports arbitrary packetized- (e.g. TS packets) or continuous streams
- Supported Devices
- gcs DVB/ASI cards
- Linear Systems ASI RX/TX boards
- DVB Master FD-U
- DekTec DTA-X cards with integrated modulator
- DTA-110 (DVB-C)
- DTA-110T (DVB-T)
- Files
- Network streams (e.g. MPEG-2 TS over RTP)
- Virtual network interfaces (input only)
- Available ULE extensions
- Bridging (RFC 4326)
- Header Padding (RFC 4326)
- TS-Concat (draft-ietf-ipdvb-ule-ext)
- PDU-Concat (draft-ietf-ipdvb-ule-ext)
- Timestamp (draft-ietf-ipdvb-ule-ext)