News and Updates

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).

You can build a basic TOFFEE WAN Optimization hardware completely in software layer (i.e its networking data-plane and control-plane). And if you are a product manufacturer you can make commercial WAN Optimization products with TOFFEE with software layer alone. And if you choose to improve its performance, you can use any third-party PCIe Compression Accelerator cards.

Network MTU research and optimization of WAN Links

Here is my home lab monthly power-consumption readings for research. This will help to measure and monitor the overall power usage and assess the power requirements. This will help me in future purchases such as UPS, battery upgrades and so on. And as well remove replace old obsolete hardware with new less power-consuming devices.

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.

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.

Here is a step-by-step DIY to build your own Intel based Mini PC WAN Optimization Device with TOFFEE. I chose this below Intel Celeron Mini PC since it is fan-less aluminium case and as well it has 2 dedicated inbuilt Gigabit Ethernet ports. You can use one for LAN Network and one for WAN Network.