| Summary: | Currently, U.S. Navy shipboard communications have a great disadvantage: the data rates of satellite links are limited, typically below 4 Mbps for each link. Improving efficient utilization of these links while out to sea is paramount to maintaining our military advantage. Also, any improvement must be transparent to end user functionality. This thesis first explored implementing a free version of a commercial-off-the-shelf wide area network (WAN) optimizer, Artica, on a simulated shipboard network consisting of three local area networks (LAN). Artica works by performing auto-corrections on some web traffic and changing the transmission control protocol (TCP) window sizes. Results from browsing Alexa's top 1,000 websites on the LANs show that Artica can speed up web traffic by 13–26% at link speeds between 1.544 and 8 Mbps. It then explored compressing Domain Name System (DNS) traffic by filtering out IPv6-related queries and removing unused fields of DNS queries and responses. Experimental results show that DNS compression did not significantly improve web traffic performance, which highlights the importance of selecting traffic-intensive applications to compress and control compression-induced processing overhead. Finally, the thesis explored whether Artica and the custom DNS compression program can be deployed together. In summary, this thesis shows that using WAN optimization techniques and saving bits over a slow data rate link can effectively speed up web traffic. Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited. Lieutenant, United States Navy NIWC PAC
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