Satellites can bring data connectivity to every corner of the globe. Today’s military depends heavily upon this capability for tactical communications. However, satellite time is expensive, bandwidth is scarce and these small data paths are crippled by inherent latency.

Typical round trip times (RTT) for a cross-country or trans-oceanic land-based WAN link are normally in the range of 100 to 200 ms, yet a satellite link can easily take up to a full second. This huge RTT causes substantial delays, especially with application protocols like CIFS, MAPI, even TCP itself.
Unlike satellite-specific optimization products, which improve the TCP behavior, our solutions tackle the three main factors affecting any WAN (including satellite based links): bandwidth constraints, TCP behavior, and application-protocol behavior.

If your company relies on satellite links to deliver data, our solutions will make an enormous, positive difference in your current application performance, as well as which applications you attempt to use over these links. Many organizations are unable to implement Exchange or Windows file sharing over satellite-linked sites because of the tremendously high latency. With our WAN accelerators, these sites can enjoy performance comparable to local offices connected through the LAN.

Through the use of Enterprise Caching technology and the open-standards based protocol SCPS (Space Communication Protocol Standard), our product family has consistently shown 100-400+% improvement in link capacity and application performance. The WAN accelerators we offer are powered by an algorithm currently used in every branch of the military. Time and time again the U.S. DoD and other Federal organizations turn to this technology to conquer the ever-present bandwidth crunch.

The use of DISA mandated SCPS protocol means open-standard latency reduction. Working at the bit level, our algorithm accelerates any application on any type of network. The appliances are incredibly flexible, benefiting mission critical data on any network topology in the harshest of environments.

BENEFITS

• Improves network & application performance by 100-400+%
• Small form factor perfect for field applications
• Expands capacity on broadband T1/E1 circuits
• Expands capacity on satellite & other low bandwidth circuits
• Rapid deployment, instant results
• Robust remote monitoring & management

Applications

• De-duplication- Approximately 70% of all data that travels the WAN is repetitive. With de-duplication, the accelerator is able to cache these binary streams as they pass through the device. Once the data is cached, only a small date reference representing that data is transmitted and the data stream is reconstructed locally on the opposite side. This reduces the amount of data crossing the satellite, resulting in reduced cost.
• TCP/IP Acceleration- One of the inherent problems with SATCOM is the associated TCP/IP latency. In many instances, latency and poor QoS prevent users from leveraging multiple services at the same time. This presents a challenge to mobile users that require mission critical voice and data services on the move. Reducing the amount of data traversing the satellite will allow for tactical units to achieve greater throughput and less recurring cost.
• Compression- Any data that is not cache-able is compressed using the WAN accelerator’s predictive compression method. This allows the user to further reduce the amount of data traffic.

more information

Practice Area Overview- Network Performance Engineering

Solution Overviews:

• Riverbed Satellite Acceleration
• Accelerate Military Satellite WANs with Riverbed and SkipWare: Combining Interoperability, Standards, and Peak Performance

Datasheets:

• Riverbed’s Steelhead Family: Acceleration Applications for the Global Workforce
• Riverbed's Steelhead Family: New Features and Updates for Steelhead Mobile 2.0
• Expand Accelerator Family: WAN Optimization Platform