Bandwidth Optimization
Wide Area Networking (WAN) has witnessed a deluge of Web-based content sharing and copious critical business transactions over the network. Technology has taken giant strides in all areas of business, with special emphasis on Information Technology (IT) based businesses. Integrating business plans, resource sharing, and communications over the global network have enabled corporate organizations to reach new heights and adopt strategic methods for productivity and business continuity.
Hosting Website content is a major task in business networking. Network managers and Webmasters face many challenges in Web hosting, and one of the major concerns is WAN Bandwidth Optimization. The bandwidth usage determines the web hosting charges, and corporate organizations that deal with a large volume of web content are keen on optimizing the bandwidth to derive maximal benefits. Bandwidth costs can be significantly reduced by employing any of even the simplest bandwidth optimization techniques. Businesses that have voluminous Web services, diligently apply extreme optimization techniques to save space. It is imperative to compress files to the highest degree without affecting the integrity of the content. In recent times, most of the Web hosts are offering unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth usage reductions are measured in megabytes.
Web content is optimized using many techniques that help to preserve bandwidth and that includes removal of line breaks and white space, removal of unnecessary quotes from HTML attributes, and compression of image files while maintaining high clarity. The three major components of WAN Bandwidth Optimization are Traffic Management / Quality of Service (QoS), Caching, and Compression. Accelerating WAN traffic depends on optimized use of bandwidth, managed network traffic and bandwidth through monitoring throughput level, latency, and other aspects. The aforementioned bandwidth optimization components are inter-dependent and provide a unified solution for enhanced network performance.
1. Traffic Management/QoS
Traffic Management in networking is the prioritization of data given to certain types of WAN traffic depending on the criticality of the data or application. Business-sensitive data and applications are given preference so as to enable continuity in business operations. Traffic management also involves limiting bandwidth to certain low priority applications. It has the capability to control inbound and outbound network traffic. Companies need to identify the right Traffic Management solutions in order to effectively manage bandwidth. While queuing mechanisms help to control bandwidth leaving the network, they do not moderate incoming traffic. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and other such technologies communicate to the servers the speed of content delivery, thereby enabling bi-directional traffic management.
2. Caching:
Caching is a technique for accelerating content delivery and optimizing WAN bandwidth. The resources are deployed over the network based on their bandwidth requirements. Caching is a bandwidth enhancement technique, which when used in conjunction with Traffic Management/QoS, proves to be an effective optimization solution for the corporate environment. Caching occurs in different forms. In most browsers, a local cache is where the already accessed web pages are present. A proxy cache is situated at the WAN edge and caches multiple user requests. It functions similar to a browser cache. A reverse proxy cache or datacenter cache helps in caching offload servers and accelerating content delivery from the data center. These types of proxy caches have a major part in actively managing WAN bandwidth. Proxy caching is beneficial especially in corporate organization that have remote offices. The employees need to access a suite of interactive Web-based applications that is centralized. By local caching of static information on the employees’ screens, dynamic content from a central computer traverses from the remote office to the main data center, and data is refreshed on the users’ screens on time.
3. Compression:
Compression is an important technique used in WAN bandwidth optimizations. It reduces the file size of data that is transmitted over the network. Dictionary compression is one of the commonly used compression types. Lempel-Ziv algorithm is an example of dictionary compression. It is structured on a dictionary, which is dynamically encoded. The dictionary actively substitutes a continuous stream of characters with codes. Many other popular compression programs including ZIP, Stac (LZS), and the UNIX compress utility employ variants of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm. Compression adds value by addressing throughput concerns. Together with traffic management techniques, compression can help in WAN latency management.
Efficiency, Compression, and Omission broadly encompass the various bandwidth optimization techniques. In Efficiency techniques, the Web content undergoes modifications to enable minimizing the number of bytes that are to be transmitted over the Wide Area Network. This involves using of external file that will cache, over using of inline scripts and styles; reusing icon images, and use of semantic markup. Compression techniques are predominately used in communication over the network as they significantly reduce bandwidth utilization. They involve compression of files on the server before they are transmitted. Real-time compression on the Web is carried out by the popular compression algorithm gzip. In the Omission technique, the unneeded bytes are omitted. Byte space consumed by comments, blanks, whitespaces, and meta tags are all excluded.
Traffic management/QoS, combined with Compression and Caching, is crucial for WAN Bandwidth optimization. Only when the WAN bandwidth is optimized, businesses will be able to function in full capacity and continue business operations. Technology vendors develop and offer customized solutions for managing the network infrastructure. FatPipe Networks, a leader in WAN optimization technology, offers a comprehensive suite of technology solutions that provide the highest levels of WAN optimization, reliability, security, and bandwidth management. FatPipe devices have dynamic load balancing capability, which enables them to optimize WAN traffic. Its router clustering technology enables high-speed data transfer through multiple lines, multiple ISPs, and backbones over the networks, and seamlessly re-assembling data streams. By constantly monitoring the response time of each dataline and intelligently choosing the traffic route, these devices save time and enable maximum bandwidth utilization.
