Every network has a certain amount of bandwidth. If the bandwidth is fully occupied, we can no longer achieve a faster experience. At this point, many people choose to add a new line or increase the original bandwidth, but that is not necessarily the only solution. This issue can be resolved through TCP/IP optimization and acceleration. This article uses the Volans router as an example for analysis.
I. One method to solve this problem is to optimize existing technical solutions. Much network traffic is still based on TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered data packet transmission, and most web applications, email, and file transfers use this protocol. However, TCP’s flow management algorithm is not advanced: if the network or receiving end cannot handle the sending transmission speed, manifested as packet loss, timeouts, or excessive out-of-order packets, the network flow transmission speed will drop by half. Subsequently, the speed will slowly increase, but it will still be significantly slower than before.
II. On WANs, the performance of TCP applications requiring long data transfers (such as large file transfers) can be severely affected: on these links, longer transmission times mean that the sender may not perceive performance degradation for a longer period, and then it takes longer to respond to the speed drop. TCP optimization can alleviate these problems by avoiding packet loss or out-of-order transmission on the network, or by directly correcting TCP flows and adjusting speed increase/decrease behaviors.
III. Stop thinking about increasing bandwidth and pay attention to congestion issues. The problem is not necessarily how much data needs to move from point A to point B, but how quickly all independent senders and receivers can complete data transmission. Behaviors like fast speed increase/fast speed decrease/slow speed increase/fast speed decrease will speed up application transmission on non-congested networks, but they increase the probability of congestion when new senders join the transmission.
For some optimizers that change speed increase behavior to slow down the initial speed increase or reduce the size of the initial speed drop, they can prevent the first occurrence of congestion and better handle threats by preemptively slowing down new traffic flows as they begin to ramp up transmission speed.
IV. Pay attention to network priorities. Traffic shaping optimizers are designed to ensure that organizations can control the bandwidth consumed. Control can be positive, i.e., guaranteeing certain bandwidth for specific applications, devices, or users; or it can be negative, i.e., limiting the bandwidth used by specific users, devices, or applications. Using them to optimize TCP traffic requires institutional clarity on the types of traffic and which applications and users have priority for network resources when congestion occurs.
V. Leaving TCP aside, an increasing amount of important traffic (video conferencing, VoIP) does not use TCP/IP; instead, it uses UDP/IP (User Datagram Protocol over IP). However, UDP does not have the same flow control mechanisms as TCP, so TCP may be more suitable for robust optimization.
UDP senders are only responsible for sending data packets, and receivers receive the data. Considering that enterprises typically set higher priority