Sandvine TCP Optimization
Slow application start-ups and the inability to buffer efficiently are symptoms that the network is not being engineered correctly. This causes unnecessary congestion and of course Quality of Experience issues. One reason for this are applications using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
TCP has been a very popular transport protocol due to its ability to keep traffic controlled. But what made it so popular in the past has made it more of burden today. TCP’s inability to have end-to-end awareness, and staying at the flow level disrupts an applications ability to perform ideally on the network. This causes slowdown in some applications and renders them unable to utilize available bandwidth, or too fast causing buffer overload. This results in dropped packets and retransmissions which ultimately affect customer Quality of Experience.
Sandvine’s TCP Optimization (TCP) software module removes the inefficiencies caused by TCP. By taking an end-to-end application approach, it helps to manage TCP and deliver higher rates of goodput (payload without retransmissions) with faster, more consistent, predictable traffic flows. Closing the gap of goodput to throughput allows for smoother QoE.
Sandvine’s TCP Optimization software module helps Service Providers manage:
- Performance
- Capacity
- Quality of Experience
All of these are a factor in eliminating retransmissions, improving transmission ramp-up (also known as SlowStart) and improving an application’s performance which is the best indicator of subscriber Quality of Experience.
