Aether is a multi-BNG ISP infrastructure lab built almost from scratch that emulates IPoE IPv4 subscriber management end-to-end. The project includes a custom vBNG with RADIUS AAA, per-subscriber traffic shaping, and traffic simulation running on Containerlab. Built by a CS sophomore over roughly a month, it serves as a learning reference for those working with closed-source vendor stacks without proper guidance.

The core component runs on an event-driven architecture where state changes pass as messages to avoid mutex handling. The session manager owns session state exclusively, with the BNG accepting no external input except through a Go RADIUS CoA daemon via IPC sockets. All BNG events and session snapshots push to Redis Streams, where the bng-ingestor processes and persists them. The demo environment resets every 6 hours or when triggered by CI.

Known limitations include significant overhead from multiple veth hops through the emulated topology, with profiling showing BNG-to-upstream throughput at 24 Gbit/s but host-to-BNG-to-upstream dropping to 3.5 Gbit/s. The 9500 MTU used isn't representative of real ISP deployments. The project lacks iBGP, VLAN, and IPv6 support, focusing instead on IPv4 networks to maintain depth over breadth. The creator welcomes feedback on questionable architectural decisions in the codebase.