The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

CIFS is the underlying protocol in Windows OS's for disk shares access such as copying files from and to remote stations in the LAN, exploring disk shares and sending jobs to a LAN printer. CIFS is also implemented for Linux/Unix OSs in SAMBA. The CIFS protocol is chatty and suffers from redundancy in messages even in simple and basic disk shares accesses. CIFS's ineffectiveness is intensified in satellite networks in which the round trip delay is large. This work presents a proxy-based approach to CIFS acceleration in satellite networks. The acceleration is done at the level of the application layer without any modification neither to the TCP layer nor to the server and the client. We studied and observed CIFS protocol behavior and developed a solution that is fitted to the protocol. The solution is light-weight, it requires little memory space, is transparent to both client machines and servers, and it fits into existing VSAT technologies aimed at developing countries. We adapted several techniques and developed algorithms to lessen the number of round trip interactions required to perfrom a single user operation. Performance evaluation shows latency improvements by a factor of two in many practical settings. In addition, bandwidth consumption is reduced. The talk is self-contained.