Getting Client & Server Talking - Demo Pt 3

Now I have an Android phone running the client and my laptop running the server, its time to get them taking.

A quick inspection of the client code shows the line "public static final int [] IP_ADDR = {128,2362,110,172}; " I change this to the IP address of my laptop and reload the code onto my android phone.

I launch the server on my laptop, the client on the Android phone and here the troubleshooting begins. Nothing appears to happen on either the client or server so I:

1. check the network connection on both client and server  ✓
2. un-install the client application and re-install it ✓
3. check the IP address of the server is correct ✓
4. Try running client on emulator ✓ just got the exact same problem 

Taking a closer look at the IP address used:

I tried to find out the IP address of the server by visiting here but i thought that I should try to take a more technical approach. Visiting connection information in Ubuntu gives me a different IP address. Now I'm fairly sure that my server is behind a NAT as is my client.

Initally I assume that the different IP address are caused by the NAT, therefore the IP address from the website, is my public IP address (the IP address of the NAT) and the IP address given to my by my OS is the private IP address, that I am referred to by machines also behind the NAT.

This explaination fails to explain why using the IP address from the website didn't work and the IP address given to me by my OS doesn't have the normal structure that I would accociate with a private IP address.

So I now repeat my initial test using the different IP address (previously I used the address provided by a website and now I am using the one provided by the OS) and it works on both the android phone and the emulator.

But by use of the word "works" I mean that the server recognises that a client has connected and the GUI on the android client provides graphs showing latency and goodput, it unfortunately doesnt mean that I've yet found a good way to extract the data to make a comparision to the data provided by Iperf to test accuracy and reliably, on the assumption that Iperf will always produce accurate results that we can assume to be the true value.

The next useful step will be to continue to explore why this IP address works and the other one doesn't. As the client and server are now able to connect I can test if this IP address is working only because both client and server are behind the same NAT or is there something more complex going on. Currently both the laptop and android phone are making use of the same Wi-FI network, so the next step in testing if this will work when the client and server are not behind the same NAT is to change the network that either is using.

The plan for testing with would be:

• move server onto another WiFi network
• find out new IP address and update client code
• test if emulator can connect to server, it should do as it used same network connection as the host computer, which in this case is the server
• test if android phone can connect to server, it should not as its now not behind the same NAT as the server
• move the android phone onto the other WiFi network
• test if android phone can connect to server, it should now be able to 

As this test is not critical for now, I will move onto Part 4 next week, where I get Iperf collecting the same data between the android client and then compare the data collected