Satelite / Longhaul

Don't let protocol design, high latency and errors slow down satellite traffic. Let transparent protocol acceleration free up bandwidth throughput and speed up application delivery.

The Challenge: Increase Satellite Performance

Satellites are great for carrying Internet and other IP traffic around the world where terrestrial (physical links) are limited, unfeasible or cost prohibitive. However, they fall short when high latency and Bit Error Rates (BERs) restrict application performance or limit links to using only a fraction of available bandwidth.

High Latency Impact

Satellite networks have high latency—or transmission delay—due to the distance data must travel. Consider geosynchronous satellites—located 22,300 miles above earth. Moving at the speed of light, data transmissions take 260 ms to go up, bounce off the satellite and then travel back down to earth. That latency combines with TCP design to drain attainable bandwidth.

Bad Application Behavior

As a result, application performance suffers. Very chatty applications—with many small bi-directional transmissions—move very slowly. Especially particularly chatty ERP queries. A one-way latency of 260 ms, in turn requires 520 ms to complete a single transmission. If you need 10 of those round trips to complete a transaction, it's 10 times the delay.

Hungry Internet Connections

Even worse, TCP—the dominant network protocol—uses special data transmission windows to wait for acknowledgements before sending more data. If that wait lasts 520 ms, the TCP connections can "starve"—particularly painful when transferring a file, backing up, synchronizing databases or even viewing a content rich Web page.

Satellite Interference

Inevitable satellite interference—airplane traffic, lightning strike or flock of seagulls—can elevate BERs, causing some of the bits to be corrupted or lost. No big deal in terrestrial networks, but in satellite, high BERs can trigger TCP congestion control, constricting bandwidth and compounding latency starvation.

The Packeteer Solution: SkyX Accelerator

Packeteer's SkyX Accelerator overcomes these issues to ensure that important data arrives at its destination efficiently and reliably. SkyX Accelerator terminates connections locally—providing low latency response with a high performance protocol—and reconnects on the other end. Dramatic improvement, yes, yet the implementation is transparent to network and application infrastructure.

Eliminate Chatty Application Delay

With a local response to connections and chats, SkyX Accelerator eliminates the chatty client-server and Internet delay when connections travel in long latency environments. SkyX Accelerator transaction acceleration reduces round-trips and application wait times, making Web and business applications perform dramatically faster.

Speed Web and XML Transactions

SkyX Accelerator also eliminates delay in delivering HTTP- and XML-based applications. No more waiting for a request to be processed, SkyX speeds connection setup, intelligently pre-caching content within connections—resulting in much faster delivery of enterprise applications delivered over Web and emerging Web service architectures.

Expedite File and Bulk Transfers

Speed file and bulk transfers by overcoming TCP windowing and stretching available bandwidth. Ramp bandwidth more rapidly and sustain high throughput rates as all TCP sessions are locally acknowledged. Even large files transfers, database synchronizations, backups and other bulk jobs run from 10 to 100 times more quickly.

Reclaim Wasted Bandwidth

By managing acknowledgements to TCP locally, connections can reclaim wasted bandwidth to fill the pipe—helping to regain 89 percent of a 2 MBPS connection.

Avoid High BER Impact

Maintain quality performance in high BER environments with fast recovery from corrupted or dropped packets. Where redundant FEC technologies rob you of capacity, SkyX Accelerator beats TCP "congestion avoidance" by quickly retransmitting packets and speeding replacement packet delivery.

Fully Optimize Satellite Networks

Extend beyond satellite issues with Packeteer's world-class monitoring, shaping, compression, acceleration and management technologies. Combine PacketShaper with SkyX Accelerator to fully optimize satellite networks.