Research

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

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).

It is quite interesting that there are few web hosting firms are offering direct CDN based hosting services. Since it is a direct CDN based hosting, it is cheap, extremely easy or transparent CDN service. It is transparent, since each time you publish your content in the hosting web-server (origin server), it is immediately is in sync automatically in the user-serving CDN caching machines. Since the hosting vendor and the CDN vendor are all the same, it is also easy to use their services. There is no incompatibility issues, interoperability issues, and better integrated analytics, are all the benefits of CDN Hosting services.

I started TOFFEE-Mocha WAN Emulation software development on 1-June-2016. I took the existing TOFFEE components as a base. Although the TOFFEE-Mocha is entirely an independent fresh Open-Source WAN Emulation solution. Ever since I am in the process of defining and inventing features. So far I come up with the most important feature which is expected to be present in any WAN Emulation software is the packet delay option.