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USENIX Annual Technical Conference (NO 98), 1998
Abstract
Increasing Effective Link Bandwidth by Suppressing Replicated Data
Jonathan Santos and David Wetherall
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In the Internet today, transfer rates are often limited
by the bandwidth of a bottleneck link rather than the
computing power available at the ends of the links.
To address this problem, we have utilized inexpensive commodity hardware to design a novel link layer
caching and compression scheme that reduces bandwidth consumption. Our scheme is motivated by the
prevalence of repeated transfers of the same information, as may occur due to HTTP, FTP, and DNS
traffic. Unlike existing link compression schemes, it
is able to detect and use the long-range correlation of
repeated transfers. It also complements application-
level systems that reduce bandwidth usage, e.g., Web
caches, by providing additional protection at a lower
level, as well as an alternative in situations where
application-level cache deployment is not practical
or economic.
We make three contributions in this paper. First, to
motivate our scheme we show by packet trace analysis that there is significant replication of data at
the packet level, mainly due to Web traffic. Second, we present an innovative link compression
protocol well-suited to traffic with such long-range
correlation. Third, we demonstrate by experimentation that the availability of inexpensive memory
and general-purpose processors in PCs makes our
protocol practical and useful at rates exceeding T3
(45 Mbps).
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