UDP Optimization

[Juli Mallett]

RK,

No there isn't, and there's unlikely to be.  While it's possible, it
doesn't make a lot of sense to do.  At least not for deduplication; for
some other kinds of protocol-specific optimizations sometimes there's value
in a UDP component, but not in the general case.

For instance, the only way deduplication works is that we know that the
remote side has received what we've sent previously.  In fact, the protocol
is even a little more stateful than that, as we need to send a UUID and
some other information at the start of a connection.  Since UDP isn't
connection-oriented, we can't treat the packets as part of a single stream,
which means higher overhead per-packet, or the risk of producing the wrong
data.  If we get a packet which has been deduplicated and says (basically)
"just send the last chunk of data you extracted", and we missed the packet
before it, we'll produce data from two packets ago, which is wrong.

So then the obvious thing is for the client-side WANProxy to listen on UDP,
take the data, frame it, send it over TCP to the server-side WANProxy,
which then connects via UDP upstream and sends the original packet.  That
solves all of those problems, but creates a new one: why are you even using
UDP?  You've now got all the problems and drawbacks of TCP, and in exchange
you get deduplication, maybe you don't have all the problems of sending UDP
across the Internet/WAN, etc.  But what's the point?  You've now got all
the latency drawbacks of TCP.  And so on.

If there's a TCP version of the protocol you're using you should use it.
 If there isn't a TCP version, there's often a good reason why.  (It's
loss-tolerant; it's latency-dependent; etc.  And for many of those
protocols, deduplication would be as big of a mistake as for a protocol
like SIP.)

If you really want to, though, it's pretty easy.  Just run any TCP-based L2
or L3 tunnelling protocol through WANProxy without encryption, and then run
your UDP sessions over the tunnel.  All the drawbacks of TCP for every
protocol you're using, all the problems of connection muxing, and totally
breaks congestion control for TCP sessions run over the tunnel, too.
 Still, if you've got a really awful protocol to deal with, or even just
want to deduplicate ARP over a long site-to-site link, it can be a useful
way to bridge two sites with a lot of loss or latency between them.

Thanks,
Juli.


On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 11:37 PM, Ramakrishna Reddy Kunreddy <
rkreddy.559 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am just trying to understand Wanproxy functionality. Is there a
> optimization for UDP traffic in Wanproxy?.
>
> Regards,
> RK
>
> _______________________________________________
> wanproxy mailing list
> wanproxy at lists.wanproxy.org
> http://lists.wanproxy.org/listinfo.cgi/wanproxy-wanproxy.org
>
>
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