Traffic Squeezer - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Is Traffic Squeezer a Layer 2, Layer 3/4 or an Application Layer based solution?
Traffic Squeezer provides WAN acceleration mechanism for both Layer-2 based Circuit switched networks as well as pure IP-based routed networks. It can be configured as a Layer-2 Transparent bridge where as in the case of IP-bases routed network based on the deployment scenario it acts as a IP-based forwarding router or as Layer-2 Transparent bridge. The Traffic Squeezer use-cases will give a clear picture about a specific use case and the respective Traffic Squeezer operation mode.
2. Does Traffic Squeezer only do compression?
Traffic Squeezer is aimed primarily to perform WAN acceleration. There are several ways to achieve the same and there are these ways again dependent on the actual deployment scenario or the specific use-case. One of the interesting things while transmitting data is to send more data w.r.t the given time frame. Keeping this objective it makes us think that such transmission would be better if we compress the whole traffic and also try to merge different independent incoming separate frames/packets and send the same in one single transmission. This technique will avoid inter-frame/packet delay and also avoid un-necessary encapsulations for small sized frames/packets.
3. Does Traffic Squeezer do per-packet (or per-frame) compression or does it combine set of incomming frames/packets(coeleasing) and do compression?
As of now the current Traffic Squeezer code does per-frame (Layer 2) compression. But the final frame-work is expected to do compression per-frame, or per-packet, with or without frame/packet coalescing. Also this compression technique can be of any algorithm (or algorithms) pluggable depending on the use-case scenario.
4. Which Compression Algorithm does Traffic Squeezer use?
Strictly speaking there is no one single or one specific compression algorithm is used in the Traffic Squeezer. Traffic Squeezer aims for the top-class WAN acceleration. And for that specific deployment scenario if any specific compression gives more advantage then Traffic Squeezer will provide the necessary interfaces to plug-in the same. It also gives users freedom to do a cascaded implementation of several compression algorithms. In this approach a data which is pre-compressed will be compressed once again in a different approach in a different compression algorithm. However the current prototype version of the Traffic Squeezer uses RLE and LZ77 compression methods. First it compresses the incomming traffic with RLE then with LZ77 method.
Refer the Data Compression Analysis section for more details.
5. Which kind of WAN services Traffic Squeezer is suited for ?
Traffic Squeezer provides a more generic and a highly modular solution which makes it suitable both for a L2-Circuit switched network and even in L3-based Routed network. But both these options require a complete different approach to perform WAN acceleration.
Refer Traffic Squeezer Use-Cases for more details.
6. Is Traffic Squeezer effective only for low-speed WAN Links, or does it also provide advantage in high-speed WAN services?
Traffic Squeezer is certainly improves the performance of the low-speed WAN links. Any typical Ethernet based LAN will operate in 10/100/1000Mbps speed. The bottleneck arises when such different LAN network segments are interconnected with a third-party low-speed dedicated WAN service. For example for a given speed of 512kbps leased line, the actual data-transfer with Traffic Squeezer would be 600-700kbps since the data which passes through the network is actually compressed and if possible also coalesced.
Traffic Squeezer is effective even for a high-speed WAN service, provided the core backend data-plane should provide extreme packet processing efficiency and achieve close to wire-speed performance. This would be possible only with the dedicated hardware packet processing support. Traffic Squeezer would act as a control plane to support the same.
7. If application layer does compression, then what is the need for Traffic Squeezer solution?
or
8. What is the advantage of Traffic Squeezer when there is a transmission of any pre-compressed files?
Compression in Traffic Squeezer may not be effective enough if the application payload is pre-compressed. But again that depends on the specific scenario. In some cases if such a generated traffic contains many small packets/frames, then Traffic Squeezer can improve the performance by coalescing the same and if possible compressing it. Moreover Traffic Squeezer has an ability to check if the newly compressed data is not providing significant compression ratio or infact if the compressed payload size is greater than the non-compressed data, then Traffic Squeezer can select the original un-processed data itself for transmission. This particular scenario is constantly being studied by various members within the Traffic Squeezer project and constant updates/fixes will be provided.
Refer the Data Compression Analysis section for more details.
9. Does Traffic Squeezer provide a complete end-product/solution?
Traffic Squeezer addresses many possible WAN acceleration techniques and also includes the supporting software framework for the same. But eventually to achieve top speed or almost wire-speed performances, the actual data-plane operation has to be outsourced to the hardware. As a proof of concept Traffic Squeezer will include every packet processing method in the software implementation. This concept can be later made available as compression on chip or any custom processing on chip based solution by any vendor.
10. What are the limitations?
This section is under construction.
11. Linux Distributions which Traffic Squeezer supports/compatible:
Traffic Squeezer prealpha:
All the prealpha versions are coded and tested only on Fedora Core 1 (2.4 based kernel). Since it is a demo prototype its not been tested/supported on multiple distributions.
Traffic Squeezer alpha:
This is yet under development and hence it would be addressed before or soon after its release.
Sponsored Ads:
