Traffic Squeezer - Documentation General Introduction

Traffic Squeezer - Objective & Scope
The objective of this project is to develop software architecture to build a WAN Network Traffic Acceleration Framework on a Linux Box implemented in C. The initial prototype version is written in user-space, but later in the Traffic Squeezer Alpha version, the actual core mechanism would be supported in the kernel space.

To control the same, a thin user-space application would be provided which provides both Command-Line-Interface (CLI) and Web based Graphical-User-Interface(GUI) to the users. The users can configure, fine-tune the operations in the actual Traffic Squeezer kernel core modules using this user-space application also they can monitor the performance and possibly get the run-time statistics, charts/graphs of the Traffic Squeezer operation with the corresponding traffic which it optimizes and sends through it.

* Please refer Traffic Squeezer Road-map for a detailed description of the same with clear illustrations.

Traffic Squeezer - Introduction

To get connectivity between various branches of the organization, a corporate will need a leased line links to their terminating/edge gateways. The gateway devices connects to the service provider’s leased line circuits to get connected to their remote branch offices. Since the leased lines are very costly, corporates will get leased lines of some kbps to few Mbps speeds.

The data which is sent can be processed in this scenario and sent through the same less capacity leased line. Based on each specific deployment scenario the processing mechanism could be incorporated. The traffic acceleration can be achieved with packet/frame coalescing, compression, protocol specific optimization or a hybrid mechanism of combination of such techniques. To achieve traffic acceleration and a better link performance, couple of Traffic Squeezer boxes are deployed at each end of the corporate network termination as shown in the below picture:

Link Traffic Acceleration Techniques
In order to perform Traffic Acceleration, Traffic Squeezer would incorporate some of these methods to boost WAN Traffic so that it gets accelerated.

       Traffic Compression
       Traffic Coalescing
       Quality of Service (QoS)
       Protocol Specific Acceleration

Traffic Squeezer Configuration Options
The current prealpha version of the Traffic Squeezer supports the Traffic Compression and Traffic Coalescing features. So at any instance the two Traffic Squeezer machines can have any combination of these. This is illustrated in the table below:

Traffic Squeezer Box Configuration (A, B)	NONE	Traffic Compression	Traffic Coalescing	Traffic Coalescing and Compression (Not yet Supported)	QoS (Not yet Supported)	Other Hybrid Mechanisms (Yet to be defined)
NONE
Traffic Compression
Traffic Coalescing
Traffic Coalescing and Compression (Not yet Supported)
QoS (Not yet Supported)
Other Hybrid Mechanisms (Yet to be defined)

Here is yet another Traffic Squeezer deployment scenario which is shown below. In this case there are more than two branch offices are interconnected using a service provider's WAN link. Each site is terminated with a Traffic Squeezer box which ensures all the data who-so-ever goes though the service provider's network is highly optimized and there by increasing the overall remote site machines/data access performance.

Here is a special Traffic Squeezer deployment scenario in which there are two sites are linked with more than one ISP service network. Its obvious that in this way there is link redundancy or fault tolerance option is provided. If one ISP fails still both sites(or offices) are connected.

And when both the ISPs are up, both sites can transfer the data in the combined speed of link provided by both ISP1 and ISP2. Load distribution/load-balancing of the traffic happens through these multiple WAN links. This is the feature of aggregating multiple WAN Links though Traffic Squeezer boxes.