Space – the final frontier (for WAN optimization)

Today's guest blogger is Naveen Prabhu, Product Marketing Manager here at Riverbed.

In November of last year, we acquired a company called Global Protocols, the leading developer of commercial SCPS-TP. SCPS-TP or the Space Communications Protocol Specification – Transport Protocol (if you are not into brevity) is a protocol that enhances data communication over high latency, low bandwidth links.  These characteristics define the problems encountered by users of Satellite Networks. Such networks also tend to be affected by a higher degree of loss (Bit Error Rate), and this makes standard TCP very inefficient (think: slow start, smaller window sizes).

Skipware, as Global Protocols' implementation of SCPS-TP is known, has become, over the years, the de facto standard for protocol optimization over satellite networks in Government and DoD deployments. Skipware can do a lot of things regular WAN optimization can't , and conversely WAN optimization can offer certain things like data deduplication that Skipware does not support. 

It is this synergistic combination of the two technologies that makes 2 + 2 = 5.

Riverbed's Steelhead appliances offer native support for LTTS (Loss Tolerant Transport for Satellite) as well as TCP Westwood, which provides satellite optimization bandwidth estimation (yeah, we need to come up with a better marketing term for this one!), Skipware acts as a catalyst to these native improvements and gives an extra boost to data communication over these skinny high latency links.

So whether you're working out in the field on a top secret mission or vacationing on a cruise ship, you can be rest assured that Riverbed's got your back!