Traffic Squeezer - Documentation FAQ

21. Who is using Traffic Squeezer and is really Traffic Squeezer is used for real production networks?
Traffic Squeezer is being already used by individual users who are using inter-connected dedicated Leased-Line subscriptions and few SOHO users too. And there are some experimental deployments.

22. Why Traffic Squeezer is Open-Source?
WAN Optimization is a vast, complex and interesting domain. Frankly speaking the more deeper one who explore more innovative ways one can find ways to optimize the traffic. Also each time new ways to optimize each distinct deployment scenario. For the same fact, it is also unlikely that nothing can be drawn as a specific standard or a single solution for this entire requirement space. There are many professional industrial products which are of-course world-class and address this requirement, but to maintain, sustain any organization requires is eventually 100s or perhaps 1000s of employees to do research, innovation, provide and sustain the product for this unique space. But it is most likely said that only a true open-source project with contributions, participation from millions of people all around the world would really make eventually the best. The code should get more refined, more new features, more ideas, and so more INNOVATION. Hence, Open-Source is the only key. Eventually it would become a project for the people by the people.

23. Traffic Squeezer is not routing packets, or packets are not getting decompressed at the remote end?
Please check the proper routing configurations and device IP settings at the each port. Turn off all the Traffic Squeezer optimization parameters and first check the deployment scenario has the end-to-end connectivity.

Check the most important settings of Traffic Squeezer such as let know the Traffic Squeezer know what the remotely connected networks are (more specifically remotely connected network addresses). Solving these dependencies should get you a successful working Traffic Squeezer deployment. Please check "routing enable" option, if not Traffic Squeezer won't do routing. Also check possibly Remote IP subnet configuration as suggested in the documentation. This is also important, when you need to setup which traffic to be optimized and which traffic not to be optimized.

After that you can enable step by step each optimization parameter. You can even auto-negotiation features where you do setting at one of the TS box, should get in-sync and get configured in the remote TS machine too. For example if you are setting one end of the TS box with compression algorithm as LZ-77, then if auto-negotiation is enabled, then automatically the other end TS box should gets applied with same configuration. This feature might need specific UDP port (or unblocked in firewall) to get basic packet flow to and fro.

Also please kindly check the Egress and Ingress port settings. Egress and Ingress are the Out-bound and In-bound ports respectively. If they are mis-configured, then you might get no compression done, or no de-compression done. Naturally if in case no decompression done, then TS Setup after compression enable setting may not work. And more worse the LAN might end-up getting garbled packets. Hence this setting at each respective TS machine is critical.

24. Can I install Traffic Squeezer in a individual machine or a end work-station or laptop?
Traffic Squeezer designed to work more as a Gateway Networking (application protocol) stack. So, for now it is not yet possible.

25. Why still Traffic Squeezer is in its alpha/pre-beta stages? When likely Traffic Squeezer get into Beta or a finished product stages?
Traffic Squeezer is mainly a open-source research project, which is trying to address some more mandatory primary requirements of WAN Optimization, as well getting up a frame-work where time to time it gets more interesting and more important features also.

Time to time if in case the current features of Traffic Squeezer matches with the requirements of a specific use-case of deployment, users can incorporate Traffic Squeezer in their production networks. Possibly Beta should provide more features, and pre-beta might provide less features, but the basic equation is that requirement vs. feature set available currently with Traffic Squeezer.

Traffic Squeezer is all started with a basic C hello-world program in my home (Kiran), and I started working on each specific scenario, so started with basic stub code in user-space which does a primitive packet switching with compression and coalesing feature in pre-alpha. This idea is expanded further and this moved to kernel space and a application control code in user-space and some new optimization features in alpha. After that I founded my own firm "Doublefish Solutions", and so Traffic Squeezer is now Doublefish Solutions Traffic Squeezer. Moved to "www.trafficsqueezer.org". Now the up-coming development is all supported via my firm, and so on. All I initially thought before started work on Traffic Squeezer, is to hack a WAN or dedicated leased-line network, where I can introduce some sort of optimization, not realizing even that there are commercial products available on this space. But later eventually ended up dreaming and getting a Open-Source Solution like Traffic Squeezer !

The development pace of Traffic Squeezer is all dependent on the available resources, support, time, contributions, sponsorships, funds and various other factors. Regards, Kiran Kankipati.

26. Why I am not getting emails from Traffic Squeezer Support or from Traffic Squeezer - Portal?
Traffic Squeezer support emails are most likely candidate can be mistaken for some illegal SPAM or Junk emails, everyday the server sends some automated and some manual emails across various users world-wide. Sometimes it can get blacklisted in case if the user enters a wrong email address in the portal or email address no longer exists. Due to which some of the third-party anti-spam services can mark it as SPAM. So if you don't get Emails from Traffic Squeezer - Portal, kindly check your Email SPAM folder and SPAM settings.

27. Can Traffic Squeezer be installed in Windows based platform(s)?
Traffic Squeezer is meant to work as a standalone network device say in your Router or Firewall, and so a router. So, for now the Traffic Squeezer is meant more as a network appliance. This makes the desktop machines transparent. In the sense no additional software need to be installed in the desktop user machines.

   The scenario is something like this:
   LAN------[ISP router+Traffic Squeezer] =========Internet/WAN/Satellite=========[ISP router+Traffic Squeezer]------LAN

   (or if ISP don't have Traffic Squeezer installed/bundled in their routers, then)
   LAN------[Traffic Squeezer] -----[ISP router]=======Internet/WAN/Satellite=======[ISP router]-------[Traffic Squeezer]------LAN

28. Issues in packet routing - Debug Packet Routing:
Please install tools like Wireshark (FREE Open-Source Packet Capture utility), to further debug and fix any packet flow/routing issues. On every Traffic Squeezer machine if possible. This should help where data/packets enter into network ports/interface and where it get dropped or not getting forwarded. Based on this you can review settings in Traffic Squeezer or within Linux Routing, or Firewall Rules and Interface configuration and so on.

Traffic Squeezer - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is TrafficSqueezer?
TrafficSqueezer is an Open Source network accelerator that improves application performance that are deployed over a WAN or one of those listed/suggested Traffic Squeezer use-case deployments.

2. What does TrafficSqueezer do?
It optimizes network traffic as it travels over your WAN. It does this in several ways:
   * It compresses traffic using several selectable compression algorithms. RLE/LZ77/LZO are currently supported.
   * It removed duplicate data from traveling the network, and instead sends a template reference of the duplicate traffic.
   * It caches open objects, and sends only changes made to that object over the WAN.
   * Does application specific optimizations.
   * Shows the statistics of the various parameters with and without Traffic Squeezer Optimization. Please read the
      entire Traffic Squeezer Online documentation to get overall big picture.


3. Who can use TrafficSqueezer?
Anyone is able to use TrafficSqueezer if they agree to the GNU License.

4. Linux Distributions which Traffic Squeezer supports/compatible:

Traffic Squeezer pre-beta:
This is the current version of TS, which should get more advance GUI integrated support and a better platform for the TS Stats.
The kernel code would eventually get ported from 2.6.21 to more newer version subsequently within pre-beta releases. Please
find the new screen-shots as well TS pre-beta GUI device control online mock-up.

Traffic Squeezer alpha:
TS-Alpha delivers a custom TS kernel (2.6.21) and a user space application to control the same.
This can be installed over Fedora CORE distribution (preferable to install over Fedora CORE 8+ distributions)
Please refer TS-Alpha user installation guide for more details. This can be found in the download section and even in the TS-Alpha source-code package.

Traffic Squeezer pre-alpha:
All the prealpha versions are coded and tested only on Fedora Core 1 (2.4 based kernel). Since it is a demo prototype its not been tested/supported on multiple distributions.

5. What hardware will TrafficSqueezer run on?
Almost anything Linux can run on. But to be more specific as listed, the Traffic Squeezer is build based on Fedora Core platform,
so a basic PC or Appliance based system with the similar distribution, one can deploy TS. TS is more favorable with Fedora, since the TS Application has distribution specific system parameter calls. Possibly in more future editions of TS, these dependencies might get further address and one can expect a even more platform independent TS releases.

6. How do I build a TrafficSqueezer box?
Check the TrafficSqueezer Installation Guide. Requires access to Traffic Squeezer Portal and need to sign-up in case if you are a new user.

7. Latencies with Traffic Squeezer packet processing/delivery?
The inclusion of Traffic Squeezer would certainly introduce the latency in overall packet delivery system. This is predictable since the TS does computation in CPU (not a co-processor off-load). So its performance is directly proportional to CPU and system resources. But if there is a convergence in WAN link and a faster or high-speed LAN network, then obviously this latency should get compensated by the basic slow delivery of WAN itself. This is true up to certain WAN network speeds (its threshold is yet to be calibrated), beyond that inclusion of TS might actually increase the packet delivery and degrade the performance. Certainly with integration of any third-party hardware acceleration boards, certain optimizations done in TS can be off-loaded and so the latency can be brought down.

8. How much faster will this make my WAN?
It reduces the amount of traffic that must travel over the WAN. Improvement will vary based on application, no. of users/sessions, and capacity of the hardware you use. Since the overall volume of data sent across WAN link is reduced and the data is highly optimized. So in this way the performance is increased and mainly well fine tuned. But this depends on various factors as described in FAQ# 7.

9. Is Traffic Squeezer a Layer 2, Layer 3/4 or an Application Layer based solution?
Traffic Squeezer provides WAN acceleration mechanism for both Layer-2 based Circuit switched networks as well as pure IP-based routed networks. It can be configured as a Layer-2 Transparent bridge (version pre-beta, but yet to be supported in pre-beta) where as in the case of IP-bases routed network based on the deployment scenario it acts as a IP-based forwarding router or as Layer-2 Transparent bridge. The Traffic Squeezer use-cases will give a clear picture about a specific use case and the respective Traffic Squeezer operation mode.

10. Does Traffic Squeezer only do compression?
Traffic Squeezer is aimed primarily to perform WAN acceleration. There are several ways to achieve the same and there are these ways again dependent on the actual deployment scenario or the specific use-case. One of the interesting things while transmitting data is to send more data w.r.t the given time frame. Keeping this objective it makes us think that such transmission would be better if we compress the whole traffic and also try to merge different independent incoming separate frames/packets and send the same in one single transmission. This technique will avoid inter-frame/packet delay and also avoid un-necessary encapsulations for small sized frames/packets. So the answer is it does compression and as well it does many other things as explained in its documentation basically to reduce the WAN bandwidth footprint without loosing any actual data.

11. Can I get further assistance or Support for Traffic Squeezer to get a successful and more customized deployment ?
Yes, with a highly affordable and nominal amount one can get support and services directly from the Traffic Squeezer team. Please visit Traffic Squeezer Portal for further details/tariff, and sign-up in case if you are a new user.

12. Does Traffic Squeezer do per-packet (or per-frame) compression or does it combine set of incomming frames/packets(coeleasing) and do compression?
As of now the current Traffic Squeezer code does per-frame (Layer 2)/per-packet (Layer 3) compression. But the final frame-work is expected to do compression per-frame, or per-packet, with or without frame/packet coalescing and couple of more hybrid optimization parameters. Also this compression technique can be of any algorithm (or algorithms) pluggable depending on the use-case scenario.

13. Porting and Integration Services ?
As explained the basic Traffic Squeezer is meant to work on a specific Kernel as well best suited for specific Linux Distribution(s), but in case if the users want this to be ported in their custom hardware appliance based platform, or WAN/CPE Gateway devices we can provide the Porting as well Integration Services.

Queries related to:
Customization, Porting , Integration services, or also for any information/clarifications, issues or grievances,
Please kindly contact us at: "support -at- trafficsqueezer dot org"

For customized industry-standard Software Automation and Operations:
Kindly contact us at "info -at- doublefish-solutions dot com"

14. Which Compression Algorithm does Traffic Squeezer use?
Strictly speaking there is no one single or one specific compression algorithm is used in the Traffic Squeezer. Traffic Squeezer aims for the top-class WAN acceleration. And for that specific deployment scenario if any specific compression gives more advantage then Traffic Squeezer will provide the necessary interfaces to plug-in the same. It also gives users freedom to do a cascaded implementation of several compression algorithms. In this approach a data which is pre-compressed will be compressed once again in a different approach in a different compression algorithm. However the current prototype version of the Traffic Squeezer uses RLE and LZ77 compression methods. First it compresses the incomming traffic with RLE then with LZ77 method.

Refer the Data Compression Analysis section for more details.

15. Which kind of WAN services Traffic Squeezer is suited for ?
Traffic Squeezer provides a more generic and a highly modular solution which makes it suitable both for a L2-Circuit switched network and even in L3-based Routed network. But both these options require a complete different approach to perform WAN acceleration.

Refer Traffic Squeezer Use-Cases for more details.

16. Is Traffic Squeezer effective only for low-speed WAN Links, or does it also provide advantage in high-speed WAN services?
Traffic Squeezer is certainly improves the performance of the low-speed WAN links. Any typical Ethernet based LAN will operate in 10/100/1000Mbps speed. The bottleneck arises when such different LAN network segments are interconnected with a third-party low-speed dedicated WAN service. For example for a given speed of 512kbps leased line, the actual data-transfer with Traffic Squeezer would be 600-700kbps since the data which passes through the network is actually compressed and if possible also coalesced.

Traffic Squeezer is effective even for a high-speed WAN service, provided the core backend data-plane should provide extreme packet processing efficiency and achieve close to wire-speed performance. This would be possible only with the dedicated hardware packet processing support. Traffic Squeezer would act as a control plane to support the same.

17. If application layer does compression, then what is the need for Traffic Squeezer solution?
or
18. What is the advantage of Traffic Squeezer when there is a transmission of any pre-compressed files?
Compression in Traffic Squeezer may not be effective enough if the application payload is pre-compressed. But again that depends on the specific scenario. In some cases if such a generated traffic contains many small packets/frames, then Traffic Squeezer can improve the performance by coalescing the same and if possible compressing it. Moreover Traffic Squeezer has an ability to check if the newly compressed data is not providing significant compression ratio or infact if the compressed payload size is greater than the non-compressed data, then Traffic Squeezer can select the original un-processed data itself for transmission. This particular scenario is constantly being studied by various members within the Traffic Squeezer project and constant updates/fixes will be provided.

Refer the Data Compression Analysis section for more details.

30. Traffic Squeezer installation in a VM/VMware?
Technically speaking Traffic Squeezer is actually a (or a sort of) Network Application Gateway. Being the fact that Traffic Squeezer (or in case any such Application Gateway) processes per packet working out in all the network layers, it needs huge amounts of processing power. This dependency is usually off-loaded in case if its a hardware appliance based device. Where the CPU just control many embedded co-processors, and most optimization/packet processing happens in those co-processors. This is similar in the case of any Mobile Phone/DVD Player/Digital Camera and so on, where various dedicated embedded processors does the actual complex computing and the CPU does the job of only task allocation and synchronization.

So we suggest to install Traffic Squeezer in a dedicated system which can have exclusive access to hardware. For the same fact Traffic Squeezer is never tested/built on any VM based framework.

31. Why Fedora?
When it comes to overall system, sometimes the distribution matters. We may or we can also rely and even install additional applications in case if needed. Also in-case if you look for building a test system, certainly all those additional tools or applications comes handy, namely GUI editors, Wireshark Packet capture utility, and so on. This way it helps both novice and advance users. Fedora is a perfect balance in-terms of simple novice open-source based desktop OS based platform, as well as a highly effective advance user developer platform, as a dedicated test machine, as a build machine or a simple server platform, and so on.

But in case if you look forward to work or make/customize Traffic Squeezer on a customized distribution/Kernel, Traffic Squeezer team can assist you.

30. Why the Traffic Squeezer delivered with full custom Kernel source instead of a simple patch/add-on?
It is often creating a patch can sometimes turn-out messy, as well just in case applying a patch on to a pristine vanilla kernel. Linux kernel is consistently and exponentially growing with every release. A patch extraction (during release) as well a patch application (during installation) can easily turn out into a inconsistency, in case if wrongly done or due to any system in-consistency during that instance. Hence also it takes a bit more considerable amount to download each Traffic Squeezer source, it greatly reduces the kernel patch application delays to the users. Also users have no need to download Traffic Squeezer compatible vanilla kernel via kernel.org.