Wide-area Network Acceleration for the Developing World

Abstract

Wide-area network (WAN) accelerators operate by compressing redundant network traffic from point-to-point communications, enabling higher effective bandwidth. Unfortunately, while network bandwidth is scarce and expensive in the developing world, current WAN accelerators are designed for enterprise use, and are a poor fit in these environments.

We present Wanax, a WAN accelerator designed for developing-world deployments. It uses a novel multiresolution chunking (MRC) scheme that provides high compression rates and high disk performance for a variety of content, while using much less memory than existing approaches. Wanax exploits the design of MRC to perform intelligent load shedding to maximize throughput when running on resource-limited shared platforms. Finally, Wanax exploits the mesh network environments being deployed in the developing world, instead of just the star topologies common in enterprise branch offices.