DOCUMENTATION 》 TOFFEE-DataCenter packet packaging feature for WAN Optimization

There are various techniques with which one can optimize their WAN Network Data. Any long distance communication can be considered as WAN Network. A decade ago any network connecting two countries, considered as a WAN network, and a network within a city as MAN and soon. But these days in general any long distance communication is considered as WAN Network. Such as your Mobile communication networks, Satellite networks, Space Networks (Deep space networks), Trans-Atlantic cable networks, etc.

TOFFEE-Mocha is my dream project which I thought working on it since several years. I want to make a WAN emulation software which is straight forward and simple to use. I used tc scripts along with iptables for testing my TOFFEE (and TrafficSqueezer before TOFFEE) and I am not quite satisfied with the same. As one can understand these scripts are not meant for WAN emulation.

I always wanted to do some real experiments and research on packet flow patterns from High-bandwidth to Low-bandwidth networks via networking devices. This is something can be analyzed via capturing Network stack buffer data and other parameters, bench-marking, and so on. But eventually the data-transfer nature and other aspects is often contaminated due to the underlying OS and the way Network stack is implemented. So to understand the nature of packet flow from Higher to Lower bandwidth and vice-versa such as Lower to higher bandwidth, I thought I experiment with various tools and things which physically we can observe this phenomena.

Today I got a feature request from Jonathan Withers. Jonathan is from a company called MultiWave Australia. He said he is able to get the TOFFEE-Mocha Raspberry Pi setup up and with that he is able to emulate geostationary satellite link. But he requested me is there a way to extend the constant packet delay from 40mS to 500mS. So as a part of his request I supported the same in the current ongoing development version of TOFFEE-Mocha.

In the previous update (17-Jun-2016) I discussed about the upcoming new Random Packet drop feature along with other completed features. Now I completed the entire TOFFEE-Mocha Random packet drop feature. I completed all the kernel components and the UI support of the same. And to make GUI settings more organized I split the earlier Basic-Settings page into two separate pages namely: Packet Drop and Packet Delay. So this way it is simple to understand settings according to their functionality.

This is my next software development update of TOFFEE-DataCenter which I am working since past few weeks. I was very busy in implementing the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components along with prototyping, benchmarking, implementing and testing the same. However today is the first time ever I did a fresh new CLI interface for the upcoming new TOFFEE-DataCenter.

Here is my VLOG Youtube video of the same which includes details about version release notes, future road-map and so on. The TOFFEE release is highly optimized and customized for hardware platforms such as x86-64 based Intel NUC and other Intel mobile computing platforms such as laptops and so on. This version (or release) is not suited and so not recommended to be used for high-end desktop and server hardware platform.

When you are dealing Deep Space Networks (DSN) one among the most challenging parts is the Interplanetary distances and communicating data across such vast distances. This is where we are not dealing with common Internet type traffic such as HTTP/FTP/VoIP/etc but it is completely different when it comes to DSN so far. So optimizing data in DSN becomes mandatory. For example if you think one of the Mars Rovers, they have used LZO lossless compression.

Here is a list of TOFFEE-DataCenter features supported. TOFFEE-DataCenter currently supports some of the important features such as loss-less network data compression, Packet Deduplication (protocols/applications supported), Application Acceleration, TCP Acceleration, dynamic MTU optimization, data packaging, hardware offload support, etc.

Earlier the TOFFEE is intended to work on IoT devices, Satellite Networks, branch office/SOHO deployments. In most cases the users may deploy just one or couple of TOFFEE devices per site. But in the case of TOFFEE-DataCenter, users can scale-up deploying the same in multiple servers in a sort of distributed cluster computing scenario. Besides the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components (such as packet processing engine/framework), I need to do lot of changes in its Graphical User Interface (GUI) too to address these new requirements.