Traffic Squeezer - TCP Acceleration and Optimization

Traffic Squeezer proposes both TCP Acceleration (the sense modify the TCP Protocol specific control parameters) and TCP Optimization (possibly replace the protocol usage, etc. ) to reduce "chattiness" in a very much low-speed WAN/Low Speed networks.

As everyone knows TCP makes a "reliable" connection and there by providing point-to-point connection oriented service. TCP in terms of the protocol context is not aware of the network-connection/bandwidth availability and limitations. Hence it floods by sending the data to the maximum till it notice any packet loses. This might prove costly for a low link speeds or WAN kind of environment. Hence this is the reason casually TCP is referred to as a chatty protocol.

Fig: Traffic Squeezer - TCP Optimization with TCP -> UDP Tunnelling

TCP Optimization - with TCP to UDP Tunneling

Inspired after couple of Open-Source projects which does TCP to UDP tunneling:

Open-Source Project: udptunnel
Project Site: http://code.google.com/p/udptunnel/
Author: Daniel Meekins

and

Open-Source Project: utunnel
Project Site: http://thebends.org/~allen/utunnel/
Author: Allen Porter

The future releases of Traffic Squeezer might have a customized and integrated UDP Tunnel in the WAN TCP-Optimization context. Traffic Squeezer might re-use the above open-source projects and can effectively modify, customize and integrate in to the Traffic Squeezer context. Or might even require porting these user-space applications into Kernel space, since the Traffic Squeezer Core built in Kernel Space.

As one can see in the picture below, UDP reduces unnecessary packet exchanges. This is vital for a low-speed links. In case a packet is lost the application with sends UDP can selectively provide the reliability just by re-transmitting the packets. So still one can achieve reliability from UDP based tunnels.

Since in this method we are tunneling TCP connections/transmissions via UDP, this is actually one of the TCP Optimization methods for Traffic Squeezer context. And once the packets are converted to UDP it can be passed to the Compression Engine of Traffic Squeezer.