The TOFFEE Project :: Documentation

I started working on the new TOFFEE project (which is the fork of my earlier TrafficSqueezer open-source project) starting from 1st January 2016 onwards. Ever since I was busy in research and altering certain old features so that it is more minimal than TrafficSqueezer, a more focused agenda, deliver refined code and a broader vision. I have lined up more things to follow in the upcoming months. I want to focus about all aspects of WAN communication technologies not just on core WAN Optimization research and technology.

The TOFFEE Project website is hosted on Inmotion Hosting. And so I am looking for alternate hosting provider to build my first CDN node. My plan is to make multiple sub-domains of my website such as cdn1.the-toffee-project.org, cdn2.the-toffee-project.org and point each of this corresponding subdomain(s) to various alternative web hosting servers geographically spread across the world. Sometimes choosing the same vendor for multiple CDN nodes may result multiple servers existing in the data-center. And this becomes an issue if there is some catastrophic network disaster.

TrueBench is an unique open-source benchmarking system in which the core system performance and efficiency parameters are measured at extreme high resolution in the order of several million/billion µ-seconds for a given specific task. TrueBench is a part of The TOFFEE Project research.

Earlier the TOFFEE is intended to work on IoT devices, Satellite Networks, branch office/SOHO deployments. In most cases the users may deploy just one or couple of TOFFEE devices per site. But in the case of TOFFEE-DataCenter, users can scale-up deploying the same in multiple servers in a sort of distributed cluster computing scenario. Besides the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components (such as packet processing engine/framework), I need to do lot of changes in its Graphical User Interface (GUI) too to address these new requirements.

Here is the TOFFEE WAN Optimization benchmarks of the TOFFEE version: TOFFEE-1.1.28. This is the current TOFFEE development version till date (2-Jul-2016). This is a HPC TOFFEE variant meant for high-end custom build servers and high-end desktops (i.e High Performance Computing a.k.a HPC). TOFFEE built this way often needs customized kernel compilation and build such as processor specific and hardware specific tune-ups since it is highly CPU intensive (if not offloaded via Hardware Accelerator Cards).

Here is my first software development update of TOFFEE-Butterscotch. In my first TOFFEE-Butterscotch news update I have introduced about TOFFEE-Butterscotch research, project specifications, use-cases, etc. Introducing TOFFEE-Butterscotch Alerts: These are simple packet counters which corresponds to the filter type. For example if the incoming TCP-SYN packets are blocked then its corresponding alert counter will increment whenever such a packet arrives and gets filtered (dropped).

Today I got a feature request from Jonathan Withers. Jonathan is from a company called MultiWave Australia. He said he is able to get the TOFFEE-Mocha Raspberry Pi setup up and with that he is able to emulate geostationary satellite link. But he requested me is there a way to extend the constant packet delay from 40mS to 500mS. So as a part of his request I supported the same in the current ongoing development version of TOFFEE-Mocha.

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.

Large Infrastructure or ISP setup: In case if you are an ISP and interested in deploying a large customer WAN Optimized network or an add-on enhanced (WAN Optimized) network for select few customers, then you can deploy something as shown below. Although this case is not meant for hobby/DIY users. This is a feasible solution for high-end professional application and the same can be deployed.

If you want to deploy TOFFEE along with a web-proxy cache (such as Squid Proxy) you can deploy the same as shown below. TOFFEE does not cache files. TOFFEE does packet level network optimization. So if you want caching your web content you can use transparent mode web-proxy cache intercepting your WAN links. A web-proxy may reduce amount of data being processed (optimized) within these TOFFEE devices and so reduce the CPU overheads and improve its performance.