News and Updates

Internet optimization through TOFFEE-DataCenter WAN Optimization Demo

TOFFEE-Butterscotch yet another variant of TOFFEE can be used to save and optimize your Home/SOHO Internet/WAN bandwidth. Unlike TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) TOFFEE-Butterscotch is a non peer-to-peer (and asymmetric) network optimization solution. This makes TOFFEE-Butterscotch an ideal tool for all Home and SOHO users.

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.

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 I do not need two devices for this purpose.

Here is my power-consumption measurements of various devices deployed within my home lab. I measured via my kill-a-watt sort of power-meter which is fairly reliable and accurate. I checked its accuracy with various standard load such as Philips LED laps and other constant power-consuming devices to make sure that the power-meter is precise.

There are various techniques with which one can optimize their WAN Network Data. Any long distance communication can be considered as WAN Network. A decade ago any network connecting two countries, considered as a WAN network, and a network within a city as MAN and soon. But these days in general any long distance communication is considered as WAN Network. Such as your Mobile communication networks, Satellite networks, Space Networks (Deep space networks), Trans-Atlantic cable networks, etc.

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.

Today I refined the first page consolidated report graphs. TOFFEE-Mocha (unlike TOFFEE) is a WAN Emulator, so the graphs are supposed to highlight this purpose and should display the overall network activity. Unlike TOFFEE, the TOFFEE-Mocha report should contain in general what is received versus what is sent across the wire. In case if the packet drop feature is enabled, you should see few missing bytes and packets. Similarly in future I may support packet duplication feature, in that case you may see more packets/bytes sent versus the packets/bytes actually received.

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.

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.

PiPG is a powerful and yet simple Raspberry Pi Network Packet Generator. With PiPG you can now fabricate custom network packets and send via any Network Interface. Supports all kinds of standard Network Ports (Linux Kernel driver generated) such as Physical Network Interface ports, and an array of virtual ports such as loopback, tun/tap, bridge, etc. indispensable tool for: Network Debugging, Testing and Performance analysis Network Administrators Students Network R&D Protocol Analysis and Study Network Software Development Compliance Testing Ethical Hackers you can generate the following test traffic: L2-Bridging/Slow protocols: STP, LACP, OAM, LLDP, EAP, etc Routing protocols: RIPv1, RIPv2, IGMPv1, IGMPv2, OSPF, IS-IS, EIGRP, HSRP, VRRP, etc Proprietary protocols: CISCO, etc Generic: IPv4 TCP/UDP, etc Malformed random packets