DOCUMENTATION 》 TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) deployment in Large Infrastructure and or ISP Networks

Here is a complete chart comprising popular communication data network standards and their respective transfer rates. I hope this reference chart will help network engineers and network software developers while performing networking tests and experiments, building WAN/network products, building WAN simulated networks of a specific standard and so on. This may also helps us to track technological advancements of communication data networks.

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.

Here is my second software development update of TOFFEE-Butterscotch. In the previous update (28-Oct-2016) I discussed about the Alerts, etc. Whereas in my first TOFFEE-Butterscotch news update I have introduced about TOFFEE-Butterscotch research, project specifications, use-cases, etc.

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.

TrafficSqueezer is an open-source WAN Optimization project. TrafficSqueezer is mainly a research project which is started around mid-2006. It is initially started as a research (or prototype) code even before it is officially registered in Sourceforge.net. But this code is just primitive user-space raw socket modules. This is later refined and a pre-alpha version is created. Followed by which Alpha release. This prototype code is moved from user-space to Linux Kernel (Kernel Space) and then the journey begin in terms of making a serious WAN Optimization solution. Once the pre-beta and beta releases are complete the mainstream series is started.

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.

TOFFEE can be used to optimize expensive Wireless backhaul network infrastructure. TOFFEE can be deployed over existing slow or often outdated old backhaul networks too. This will leverage mobile ISPs and network service providers to reduce their bulk IT CapEx and OpEx Costs.

Here is my video article on Network Latency in WAN Networks (such as long distance Satellite links, etc) and how you can optimize the same to achieve better network performance.

The TOFFEE Project :: TOFFEE-Mocha :: Linux Open-Source WAN Emulator

VPN Networks may degrade network performance due to various packet processing overheads such as encryption and by adding extra network protocol header(s) (such as IPv4/IPv6, IPSec, etc). This may inflate near MTU sized packets and causes excessive packet fragmentation. Here are the few examples of packet processing involved in a VPN (or a VPN like) Tunnel. With TOFFEE you can optimize these packets even before they get processed on to a VPN device. TOFFEE optimizes packet contents (application payload and transport headers) so that these TOFFEE optimized packets when they get processed by VPN devices (or VPN software stack) they may never need further packet fragmentation. Here is a deployment scenario of TOFFEE with VPN devices.