| Analyzer | A module of the DaCoPAn project. Done by the Petrozavodsk group. Reads and analyzes packet trace files and produces a protocol events file as it's output. |
| Animator | A module of the DaCoPAn project. Done by the Helsinki group. Reads protocol events files and scenario files. Animates the protocol exchanges using various parameters. To be used as a teaching tool to instruct students on protocol basics found in the protocol event files. |
| Packet trace file | A file produced by the tcpdump program. Acts as the input for the analyzer. This file contains all the relevant protocol traffic information from one host endpoint. Two of these are required for creating a single protocol event file. |
| Additional input log | A file containing extra information needed by the analyzer to produce the protocol event file. |
| Protocol events file | The output of the analyzer. Read by the animator. Contains data about the network traffic that will be animated by the animator. |
| Intermediate file | OBSOLETE! Used early in the project to refer to the file written by analyzer and read by animator. Replaced by terms Protocol events file and Scenario file to highlight the distinction that there are two different file formats that the Animator can read. |
| Message mapping | A subphase performed by the analyzer, where corresponding messages between the two packet trace files are combined to form a single protocol event or events. |
| Animation configuration | XML data that the animator module can write into the raw protocol event file. A teacher user enters various parameters like comments, breakpoints and animation settings into the animator when creating a scenario file. This data is then appended in XML format as a separate section into the protocol events file. Once this data is appended to the protocol events file, it becomes a scenario file, ready to be used by a student.
VV 27.2.: Does this mean the data in the file, or the configuration used by the program at a point in time, or what? |
| Scenario file | An XML file written by the Animator and read by the animator. Contains all the data from Protocol events file, but also additional data related to how the scenario can be presented to the user. From student enduser's point of view, for each scenario he can just load one file per one educational scenario. That file is called Scenario file. Additional animation information can include one or more sets of animation settings, each including animation type, detailed settings for animation type (e.g. selection of variables), start time, end time and comments. If there are more than one set of settings included, the sets form a sequential presentation that can be viewed from the beginning of first animation to the end of last animation without further user actions. |
| Scenario | Usually means a grouping of data that is present in the requirements specification document. This data forms a single protocol exchange, with a focused educational purpose.
VV 27.2.: Does this mean networking scenario, educational scenario or what? I think we should only use more specific terms. |
| Network traffic unit | Or just 'traffic unit' for short. This means a single piece of a protocol exchange. On the Transport layer this means a packet, on the network layer this means an IP-datagram, and on the application layer this refers to an HTTP reply or request, or other application layer entity like a DNS query or the likes. The term protocol unit is just a common name for all of these, it's the unit to be displayed for each layer. |
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