White Papers
Stepping on the WAN Accelerator
by Wes Simpson, Telecom Product Consulting
The whole idea of web and WAN acceleration has a lot of appeal, on both an emotional and on an economic level. After all, who wouldn’t want to do things quicker on the Internet and save money at the same time? However, when most people go to investigate this market space, there is a bewildering variety of technologies available, and a large number of suppliers all claiming that their solution is the best. In this white paper, Wes Simpson, President of Telecom Product Consulting, takes on the challenge of making sense out of all these claims. Download
WAN Optimization & Application Acceleration Solutions
There are several choices when it comes to WAN Optimization and Application acceleration technology: WAN Appliance vendors, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Application Delivery Networks (ADN), and software suites designed to speed file transfers along the “digital supply chain.” This white paper explores the solutions available today, examine their different approaches, and also looks at a segment of the market that has remained unsolved until recently: the “one to many” acceleration of large files via TCP that do not require either hardware or a software client at the receiving end. Download
TCP Evolution and Comparison
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most common transport layer protocol that provides a reliable stream of data end-to-end from a server to a client. The basic design was invented in and was subsequently developed into the TCP/IP standard in 1981. The original TCP standard includes a mechanism to prevent a TCP sender from overwhelming a TCP receiver (what was called flow control), but no mechanism to prevent a TCP sender from overwhelming the network (what was called congestion control). This worked well at the time because the hosts were slow and small in number, and hence the network was rarely the bottleneck. In 1988 the first congestion control algorithm, called Tahoe, was incorporated into TCP in the BSD version of Unix. That quickly evolved into TCP Reno in the early 1990s. FastTCP, developed at Caltech, as a standards-compliant rebuild of the TCP protocol, uses a delay-based approach to address both delay for congestion/flow control and packet loss for loss recovery. This paper discusses the various variants of TCP and how they react under evolving network conditions and requirements. Download
Performance Benchmark White Paper
Companies that depend on the transfer of large files – like video and design files – lose valuable time and productivity waiting for data to download. FastSoft’s E Series decreases the file transfer wait time for clients, employees, partners, and suppliers with a single-box tool that does not require any hardware or software on the receiving end. This white paper explores transfer time benchmarks for common file downloads over various link speeds with and without FastSoft Internet acceleration. Download
FastTCP: From Theory to Experiments
In this IEEE publication, FastSoft’s founders, Steven Low and Cheng Jin describe the FastTCP variant of TCP and how it sustains high throughput and utilization at multigigabits per second over large distances. It discusses the background theory behind FastTCP, its key features and their first experimental results. Download
