WAN Optimization

End-to-end quality of application flows depends on the capacity of the links and on the end-to-end delays. WAN Optimization, that leverages the Application Control feature, helps improving quality by accelerating delay sensitive applications and by reducing bandwidth consumption.

Compression

For many reasons, it can be difficult to increase the bandwidth of a link (cost, operator delay, etc.). Compression overcomes this problem, by increasing the volume of traffic that can be sent on the network. To achieve that goal, compression is used: it is a transparent mechanism that uses a TCP proxy and stores the redundant patterns, at the stream level, on the appliances and exchanges small signatures instead, thus reducing bandwidth consumption.

It is particularly efficient to compress big flows such as large file transfers, for instance.

Compression also accelerates TCP, by using window scaling (RFC 1323) between the two proxies.