Akita Reticulum Enhancement System (ARES)

Organization: Akita Engineering Website: www.akitaengineering.com License: GPLv3 Version: 0.1.5-alpha

Overview

The Akita Reticulum Enhancement System (ARES) is designed to elevate the Reticulum network stack by providing robust, modular, and feature-rich enhancements. This system aims to improve the resilience, performance, observability, and overall capabilities of applications built on Reticulum.

ARES is built with a modular architecture, allowing features to be developed, integrated, and maintained independently.

Core Goals

• Enhance Robustness: Implement features like advanced request retries and circuit breakers.
• Improve Performance: Introduce intelligent mechanisms like metric-based path selection.
• Increase Capabilities: Add functionalities such as globally routable multicast and destination proxying.
• Simplify Management: Provide comprehensive configuration, centralized logging, and a CLI.
• Ensure Reliability: Through comprehensive error handling and thorough testing.

Features (Planned & In Development)

• Robust Request Retries:
  • Automatic retry mechanism for Reticulum.request() calls.
  • Configurable retry parameters (retries, delay, jitter).
  • Detailed logging of retry attempts and failures.
  • Metrics for retry attempts, successes, failures, and duration.
• Metric-Based Path Selection:
  • Intelligent routing decisions based on network metrics (e.g., RTT, hop count, link quality).
  • Dynamic path selection to optimize network performance.
  • Support for custom metric evaluation modules.
  • Metrics for path selection events and chosen path quality.

Akita Reticulum Enhancement System (ARES)

Organization: Akita Engineering Website: https://www.akitaengineering.com License: MIT Version: 0.1.6

Overview

ARES (Akita Reticulum Enhancement System) provides modular enhancements to the Reticulum (RNS) network stack. It focuses on improving resilience, observability, and operational behavior for applications using RNS.

Status

• Core modules implemented and unit tested.
• Current test coverage: all unit tests pass locally (29 tests).

Key Features

• Robust request retries with configurable backoff and jitter.
• Circuit breaker implementation for isolating failing operations.
• Metric-based path selection (RTT / hops / custom metrics).
• Destination proxying support (client and proxy node logic).
• Prometheus metrics with a simple /metrics and /health endpoint.
• JSON-based configuration with optional JSON Schema validation.

Project Layout

• akita_ares/ - package source
  • core/ - config, logging, utilities
  • features/ - pluggable features (monitoring, proxying, path selection, retries)
  • cli/ - command line interface
  • main.py - application orchestration
• tests/ - unit tests (run with pytest)
• examples/ - example config and schema files

Quickstart

1. Create and activate a virtual environment:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate   # on Windows: .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

2. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install pytest

3. Copy and adjust configuration:

cp examples/sample_config.json ~/.ares_config.json
# edit the file as needed

4. Run tests:

python -m pytest -q

5. Run the CLI (start is default):

python -m akita_ares.cli.main_cli --config /path/to/config.json --loglevel INFO

Notes

• RNS (Reticulum) is optional for running unit tests; features that require RNS have fallbacks and will log warnings when RNS is not present.
• The package uses a small built-in HTTP server to expose Prometheus metrics and a /health endpoint.

Contributing

Contributions, bug reports, and PRs are welcome. Please follow the standard GitHub workflow: fork, branch, commit with clear messages, and open a PR against main.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.

Contact

For questions, reach out to the Akita Engineering team via the project repository.