SoftAccel: A Software-Only IP Network Application Accelerator

Internet technologies are making rapid progress, but achieving high performance of network application over the WAN remains a challenge. When branch office’s workers access enterprise applications locating in data center, the performances drop dramatically. To solve this problem, many hardware accelerators are produced. In this paper, we introduce a Software-only IP Network Application Accelerator (Soft Accel), for improving network applications performance over the WAN. To overcome the performance-limiting factors associated with WAN, transport protocol and application protocol, Soft Accelcombines application proxy, delta compress and TCPoptimization techniques. We have implemented Soft Accel in the form of framework, so people can design and test their optimization technologies based on it. Experiments in WAN environment show that Soft Accel can improve the performance of IP network applications at least by 2x.