News and Updates

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.

TOFFEE Fudge is a simple intuitive Network Packet Generator which can be used to create custom test synthetic Network Packets and can be used in various applications such as networking research, network infrastructure troubleshooting, ethical hacking, as a network software development tool and so on.

Today I have done a test setup so that I can able to connect my Android Samsung Tab via TOFFEE DataCenter. Below is my complete test topology of my setup. For demo (and research/development) context I configured TOFFEE DataCenter in engineering debug mode. So that I do not need two devices for this purpose.

Timelapse Screen Capture of TOFFEE-DataCenter Network Acceleration - with new RRDtool graph support

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.

Assume you have two sites (such as Site-A and Site-B) connected via slow/critical WAN link as shown below. You can optimize this link by saving the bandwidth as well possibly improve the speed. However, the WAN speed can be optimized only if the WAN link speeds are below that of the processing latency of your TOFFEE installed hardware. Assume your WAN link is 12Mbps, and assume the maximum WAN optimization speed/capacity of Raspberry Pi is 20Mbps, then your link will get speed optimization too. And in another case, assume your WAN link is 50Mbps, then using the Raspberry Pi as WAN Optimization device will actually increase the latency (i.e slows the WAN link). But in all the cases the bandwidth savings should be the same irrespective of the WAN link speed. In other words, if you want to cut down the WAN link costs via this WAN Optimization set up, you can always get it since it reduces the overall bandwidth in almost all the cases (including encrypted and pre-compressed data).