01 - Harmony_Features

Pro

prie

tary

and C

onfid

entia

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Harmony Features

Harmony Platform Training

2 Proprietary and Confidential

What is Optimization?

Acceleration

Data Savings

On the Backhaul (Radio side)

On the Transit (Internet side)


Optimization tools save resources

Data reduction in downlink traffic (backhaul)

Data reduction in uplink traffic (backhaul)

Data reduction in transit traffic

Enterprise

Internet

Operator Portal

Harmony

Platform

GGSN/PDSN Gateway


Why is Mobile Browsing Slower?

Server Side

Delays

Server-side and

transmission Delays


Slow Mobile Browsing: Server-Side Delays

High network latency for physically remote sites

Server load may impact client servicing time

Redirected pages waste the original request causing

client to start request over again to redirect server


Slow Mobile Browsing: Transmission Delays

Browsing using HTTP consists of a separate serial

request from client to server, for every object within

a page

Network latency for each request/response is 700ms

– 100 ms (2.5G-3.5G) roundtrip

HTTP Get Request

HTTP Get Request

HTTP Get Request

HTTP Get Request

HTTP Get Request

HTTP Get Request


Slow Mobile Browsing: Transmission Delays

Standard TCP is not optimized for connections with

fluctuating bandwidth

There is a lot of data (rich content) to be transferred

Additional bandwidth does not help!


Acceleration Factor

Total time to Download UN-Optimized

Total time to Download Optimized Acceleration Factor

for a URL =

If Acceleration Factor is

greater than 2, Download

time is twice as fast!

6 Sec

12 Sec


Optimization Techniques

TCP 4TE Transport Layer Optimization

Pipelining

Connection Management (HTTP+)

Compression and Content Handling

Text Compression

Web Caching

Inline CSS & Java

Video Optimization

Buffer Tuning

Transcoding

Caching


Transport Protocol Optimization (TCP 4TE)


Transport native behavior

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Link Bandwidth

Packet loss

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Unused Capacity

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TCP behavior result in underutilization of the wireless link


TCP 4TE Bandwidth Utilization In Du-meter

Optimized

Not Optimized

TCP Slow Start

TCP Congestion Avoidance


TCP 4TE

TCP 4TE is an optimization of the TCP protocol

parameters and other features to make TCP more

efficient over the wireless link by employing

Shared rate control

Dynamic Rate control

TCP parameter tweaking

TCP 4TE, has the semantics and form of standard TCP, yet

differs in the rate-control mechanisms and retransmission

decision-making. Thus, it is compatible with standard TCP

peers


TCP 4TE Shared Rate Control

TCP connection rates are managed individually by

connection.

Each connection with its own Congestion Avoidance

RESULT: TCP connections originating at the same

terminal compete for bandwidth

TCP 4TE applies shared rate control and

eliminates this competition


TCP 4TE Dynamic Rate Control

Bandwidth: 0.9 Mbps 1.2 Mbps

Rate detection: Network delays increased by 25%

Harmony Action: Decrease rate by 25%

Similarly if delays decrease, Harmony will increase its rate

Harmony


TCP 4TE TCP Tweaking

TCP 4TE optimizes the

TCP protocol

parameters to make

TCP more efficient over

the wireless link


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Native TCP vs. Harmony Rate Control


Auto Tuned TCP 4TE

Unique Patented TCP stack algorithm

Increasing effective bandwidth

Reducing packet losses

Improving slot utilization by adjusting MTU to physical RF MTU size

Much more Dynamic Rate control than TCP stack to overcome slow

adjustment of TCP stack to dynamic network conditions

Shared rate Control for all user connections

Packet Building to reduce packet header overhead.

Self-configurable (see next slide)

Supports IPv4 and IPv6


Auto Tuned TCP 4TE

Self-configurable TCP 4TE: Easier Management and Higher

Throughput : Auto Tuned TCP 4TE will accommodate changing

network conditions, adapting to them smoothly. This creates a

more efficient TCP 4TE mechanism and thereby a higher effective

throughput, also reducing maintenance. Even for LTE networks!

20mbps 30mbps

4G NetworkWith TCP Optimization

T-1 US operator lab tests 100 MB HTTP download over 4G network

4G Network


Pipelining Gateway


Pipelining Gateway

Pipelining is part of the HTTP standard

In Pipelining, the browser sends multiple HTTP

requests on the same connection independently of

the responses, and expects to receive the responses

at the same order of the requests that were sent.

Pipelining reduces overhead and improves browsing

speed

Harmony acts as a proxy and allows this feature to be

implemented for all Web server content and

supporting browsers, regardless of the target web-

server configuration.


Pipelining Gateway

When the browser already supports pipelining of an

object’s request, the Optimization server acts as a

pipelining gateway even if the Web server does not

support pipelining

Harmony acts as a proxy to implement pipelining for

all traffic to browsers configured to support this

feature

Pipelining performs a function similar to that

accomplished by Connection Management. Harmony

is configured so these two methods are not used

together


HTTP sessions without pipelining

WEB Server


HTTP sessions with pipelining

Browser WEB Server Harmony


Connection Management (HTTP+)


HTTP Native Session without Harmony

Bandwidth

PageSize

TCP

ObjectsRTTTime

#

#

Browser WEB Server Browser allows a maximum of 2 TCP

connections per server


Connection Management – HTTP+

Many browsers are limited by the number of parallel

TCP connections they can open per host

In order to release this bottleneck, Harmony

manipulates the HTML page returned to the client’s

browser by adding fake hosts to referenced objects

This causes the browser to send all HTTP requests to

referenced objects at once

When the requests for the manipulated objects arrive

from the client side, Harmony system replaces the

fake host addresses with the real host addresses

before the request reaches the Web server


Connection Management

Browser Yahoo.com Harmony

Time = RTT X # Objects

N x #TCP +

CompR x PageSize

Bandwidth ~


Connection Management - How does it work?

Browser

HTTP Get www.yahoo.com

Harmony HTTP Get www.yahoo.com

Typical HTML Data Response

Object:

www.yahoo.com/pict1

Object:

www.yahoo.com/menu

Object:

www.yahoo.com/pict2

Object:

www.yahoo.com/bann

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If the browser receives the

data as-is, it will request

the objects over only 2

TCP connections per host

http://www.yahoo.com/

http://www.yahoo.com/


Connection Management - How does it work?

4

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Harmony will manipulate the

data by adding fake host IP’s

thus increasing the number of

connections that can be opened

by the browser

Object:

http://64.19.142.12/www.yahoo.com/pict1

Object:

http://64.19.142.11/www.yahoo.com/menu

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HTTP GET http://64.19.142.12/www.yahoo.com/pict1

HTTP GET http://64.19.142.11/www.yahoo.com/menu HTTP GET http://64.19.142.13/www.yahoo.com/pict2

HTTP GET http://64.19.142.10/www.yahoo.com/bann

HTTP GET http:///www.yahoo.com/pict1

HTTP GET http:///www.yahoo.com/menu HTTP GET http:///www.yahoo.com/pict2

HTTP GET http:///www.yahoo.com/bann

Object:

http://64.19.142.10/...

Now, all objects

are requested at

once over parallel

TCP connections

Browser

Harmony

Harmony


Text and Image Compression


Compression and Content Handling

Various means of compression and content handling

Generic

Image color reduction

Text Compression

Compress segments on-the-fly

Used intelligently due to high resource consumption

Apply different compression engines to different content types

No processing of uncompressible flows


Generic compression

Generic compression– adaptive and selective,

Lossless compression.

The engine is selectively applied only to compressible

flows. High compression ratios can be achieved even

when compressing small chunks (adaptive)


Image Color reduction – Lossy compression

Image Compression- Lossy compression of images

(GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP), by reduction of frequencies

(JPG) and colors (GIF). Conducted on the fly–in

chunks


Lossy Image Compression

“Excellent” image quality

(13.5KB)

Original image quality

(22KB)


Image Compression - additional features

Animation color reduction – Lossy compression of

animation. Harmony can maintain the animation while

reducing the image quality and can clip static GIFs

Policy based - using PCRF/AAA accounting server –

different compression level for different users.

URL/Host based - allows the operator to override any

image compression level that is a part of the user profile or

device profile when it comes to a specific URL or Hosts.

For small jpeg files (configurable – by default less then

8K), the compression is for the whole file at once (the file

is first downloaded entirely and then compressed) to

improve system performance.


Text compression

Text compression is implemented using both GZIP

and Deflate text compression algorithms.

It is used according to the encoding type accepted by

the client without affecting the integrity of the data

Text Compression is applied on any text content


Simultaneous Processing

Compressing multiple objects simultaneously is a

challenge

Flash Networks has registered a patent covering the

simultaneous compression of multiple objects

Furthermore, applying compression on the fly is very

different from offline compression



Compressing

Transmitting compressed JPEG

Collecting the original JPEG

Wait for the whole image, compress it, and

send the compressed image to the terminal

Offline (Regular) Compression


Adaptive (“On-the-fly”) compression

Applying compression “on the fly” is used in Harmony

Platform Solution

As soon as the image arrives from the Internet to

Harmony, it is compressed and sent to the receiving device

Parts of the image are compressed “on-the-fly” and

transmitted to the terminal while the original image is still

flowing to Harmony. This provides higher transmitting

speed due to the parallelization compared to offline

compression



Collecting the first chunk

Compressing chunk by chunk

Transmitting compressed chunks

Results in superior speed

Adaptive (“On-the-fly”) compression


Inline CSS & JavaScript


Inline CSS & JavaScript

Many web-pages carry CSS and Java scripts. Such

scripts are integral part of the page and are

referenced in the main page’s HTML

After the first browsing attempt to a page, the HTML

and all objects are cached in Harmony

For any subsequent browse to this page - Harmony

inserts referenced CSS & JS files into the main HTML

page and serves the manipulated page

This reduces the amount of requests and reduces

the number of RTTs needed to read the HTML page,

because the CSS & JS files are already in the local

buffer when the browser is ready to reference them


Browser Yahoo.com Harmony

Inline JavaScript and CSS - flow


Caching


Caching

To reduce the processing time, Harmony offers

several ways of caching of content, so repeated

requests for content can be fully or partially fulfilled

by content that is already cached

Caching minimizes the dependency on the Internet

response time of pages and objects

The content is saved according to the caching

directives of the objects


Extended Caching

To maximize the caching of images, Harmony

enhances the caching parameters of objects in the

HTML page so that when the object caching time has

expired, it will first revalidate against the origin

server whether the locally-stored cached content is

still usable.

Harmony also uses heuristics on objects for which the

origin server did not specify any cache directives or

expiration validator

This reduces transactions of objects already saved in

the browser's cache.


Caching– Post Optimization Caching (POC)

Harmony Caching offers caching of already optimized

content - POC.

Repeated requests for content can be fully or partially

fulfilled by content that is already optimized and cached.

This capability improves performance as it minimizes

processing time and raising overall system throughput

capacity

Objects may be stored with different image/video quality

levels once they were already processed optimized.


POC Caching – 1st Request

Yahoo.com Harmony

•1st time

request

1.Browser

requests

www.yahoo.com

2. Harmony requests

page and objects

•4. At the same time, objects of the requested

page are placed in Harmony internal cache

3. The browser receives

the HTML and all objects

in their optimized form

•Internal Cache


•Internal Cache

POC Caching - Subsequent Requests

Yahoo.com Harmony

Next

Request

1.Browser

requests

www.yahoo.com 2. Harmony requests page

4. Harmony response

•5. Browser requests

Objects

•6. Object for this and all subsequent requests

come directly from cache. Objects not located in

cache are retrieved form the internet.

•3. Harmony checks

if the page objects

are located in the

internal cache


Video Optimization


Video Optimization

Buffer Tuning

Saving network resources

Offline Transcoding

From inefficient codecs to efficient codecs

Reducing video bit rate

Video Caching

Centralized cache


Tuning Buffer Size

Source: Visible Measures Blog, September 2012

How much of a typical online video is actually viewed?

Over 50% of the sessions are

stopped after less than one minute


Tuning Buffer Size

• FLV/F4V header parsing provides superior results

40% Data Save

30-40% throughput reduction

14% throughput reduction over all videos


Buffer Tuning

Un-Buffered

Extra network usage

Buffered

Efficient network usage

Plus 15% Faster video start time

Particularly effective as

many videos are

abandoned prematurely


Transcoding

• Transcoding of inefficient codecs

• Transcoding of codecs to lower transmission rate

• FLV/F4V, H.264/VP6/Sorenson


Supported Video and Audio Types

Codecs

H.263, MPEG4, H.264, Sorenson, VP6, VC-1, WebM

MP3, AAC-LC, AAC-HE

Many other codecs

Formats

Flash Video 7,8,9,10

Silverlight – 1,2,3,4 (Q2 2010)

3GP, 3G2

MP4


Video Caching

Cover 40% of the video traffic while

transcoding only 5%

100%

75%

50%

25%

60% 48% 36% 24% 12% 72% 84%

% of videos

% of video traffic

Hit rate

100%

Highly cost effective!


Video Caching

Cache key is MD5 derived from the first 8k of the

video stream

This results video caching being URL independent

This provides more cache hits

Centralized cache mechanism with distributed storage

Increase video hit ratio

Decreased I/O usage

Better usage of the transcoding severs


A solution designed for low cost systems - reducing the

need for external storage

When Second Hit Caching is enabled – Harmony caches

only after the second time a video was watched (either

partially or until the end).

This reduces I/O on disk by 50% at the expense of 20%

less bytes hit ratio (e.g. from 30% to 26%).

Second Hit Caching


Video Cache Auto-Completion

• Increases the cache hit rate by population of clips that

were not completely downloaded by user

• This feature adds ~5% to the byte hit rate

• Default is 80%: if a user stops after downloading at least

80% of a video – Harmony continues the download and

stores the video in the cache

• The feature and the percentage value are configurable

80% User download

20% Harmony download

(Automatic


Online transcoding

Harmony supports online transcoding of videos – first time

requests for videos (e.g. video is not in Harmony cache) can

undergo transcoding in real-time and served to the requesting

subscriber

Online transcoding may be performed on both MSP (local blade

handling the transaction) and external transcoder blades (remote)

to use the platform’s resources more efficiently


The same video will be transcoded and cached in

several (normally 3-4) qualities to allow class of service

offering. All files will be considered as one when the

video is purged from the video cache.

Serving specific level of transcoding according to:

Radius profile attributes

Busy hour configuration

Specific URL

IP range

The selected transcoding level is fixed and enforced

throughout the session

Multi-Level Transcoding (MLT):


Dynamic Rate Adaptation (DRA)

Dynamic Rate Adaptation (DRA) – adapts the inherent video

bitrate to match the network delivery bandwidth.

This provides the best performance in terms of data saving and

enhanced QoE, at the expense of increased resource utilization

No DRA scenario:


Offline Dynamic Rate Adaptation (DRA)

Offline DRA works by transcoding offline each video into three

different bitrate levels.


Online Dynamic Rate Adaptation (DRA)

Online DRA allows the HPI (local) or Transcoder (remote) to

change the encoded rate of the video during the session, based on

the network conditions thus eliminating annoying video stalls.


Hybrid DRA

Offline DRA for short tail videos (videos that are

frequently requested)

Online DRA for long tail videos (videos that are

requested infrequently).

Harmony provides Hybrid DRA which combines both

offline and online DRA to maximize both coverage

and efficiency of the transcoding process as part of the

transcoders are allocated to offline DRA and part are

allocated for online DRA (this partition is even

configurable per hour of the day)


Download Optimization


SW Download/Updates Caching Accelerating Downloads and Reducing Transit Traffic

Harmony Optimization

Downloads Cache

GGSN

• Signature based • Large files • Central cache • High hit-rate

File caching accelerates downloads and reduces transit load


SW Download/Updates Caching

To improve stability (by avoiding the caching of

problematic files) and accuracy of caching, the

caching of software updates is according to the Block

and White lists based on the Host and User-Agent.

The software update file is inserted into the Media

Cache.

Caching of fragmented files is also supported.


Busy Hour SW Download Shaping/Thorttling Making room for others

Network peak

Local congestion

Peak is smoother

Better QoE

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1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00 8:00

• Room for more traffic/users

• Better total QoE

Today With file download shaping

Normal download speed Throttled download


Smoothing the SW Download Shaping/Throttling Transition period To avoid releasing all throttled sessions together when the

peak hour ends and thereby creating a potentially dangerous traffic spike, several options to smooth D/L shaping were made available:

Stop shaping immediately after peek hours

All throttled sessions that started during peak hour shall continue to be throttled until they finish. Any new session starting after peak hour will not be throttled.

Random halt – For each throttled session, Harmony will stop throttling after a random number of seconds from the end of the peak hour. The limits to the random number can be configured to between 1 and 3600.

(The current default option is Random halt)


SW Download Optimization Technical details

Harmony can throttle the download rate of files larger than a configurable threshold of 10 MB (by default) to a configurable bitrate (default is 33 Kbps). By default, this feature is activated only in Rush Hour but can be configured to be active continuously.

Supported software download for caching and for shaping include: • Windows updates • Adobe Flash Player updates • Google – background application updates • Real Player updates • AVG Anti-Virus • Mcafee Anti-Virus • Apple Donwloads • CNET Downloads • Sourceforge • And more…


Layer8


Layer 8™ User Engagement Platform

The Layer8 User Engagement Platform is a

network-based solution that requires no client

installation

Layer8 enables a floating HTML layer offering

users direct access to a variety of operator

and web network services

Layer8 supports several display modes,

specifically customized for each end-user

device (resolution, portrait, landscape)


Layer 8™ User Engagement Platform – cont’d

Layer8 insertion does not slow down the web

page download and display – it is loaded after

the web-page.

The Layer8 platform is highly customizable

and can be enabled/disabled per:

Device family

Browser family/version

Device’s Operating system family/version

Target URL or domain name

Any mixture of the above


Layer 8™ – technical details

The Layer8™ platform injects a script into the

main HTML page which points to a

configurable pre-defined fully qualified domain

name (fqdn) agreed upon with the operator

(e.g. content.webacceleration.com)

The HPI intercepts all client traffic and hence

received requests destined to the configured

host

Once the HPI detects requests for the

configured host, it does not forward them to

the Internet but instead delivers content which

is stored locally on the HPI


Harmony Lifecycle Management


Harmony Lifecycle Management

Automated installer streamlining blade installation and software

upgrades:

1. The first EMS node is installed from DVD

2. A Harmony package containing blade center information and

network topology is deployed

3. All additional blades (secondary EMS, log server, MSPs, SPM

nodes, transcoders) are installed using HLM which for every blade

takes care of changing the network boot order, performing

network-based installation, restoring the boot-order, verifying the

installation and running post-installation procedures.

4. HLM also supports a scripted inline upgrade of Harmony software

even if the upgrade requires re-installing the O/S on all blades.


IPv6 support


IPv6 support

Harmony is fully compliant with Internet Protocol Version 6

(IPv6) Specification as described in RFC2460

Harmony offers full optimization support in IPv6

environments by implementing a dual IP stack supporting

simultaneously IPv4 and IPv6 client traffic

Harmony supports DNS resolution for IPv6 hosts and

supports separately configured servers for IPv4/6 resolving

Harmony supports switching the user’s IPv6 address while

in session by tracking the user identification records from

the IPv6 header

Harmony supports IPv6 attributes received in the same

RADIUS message containing IPv4 attributes

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2460

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2460


IPv6 DNS flow

MSP Servers send DNS

traffic to a VIP on the

ADC on IPv4

ADC parses the DNS

record type

If the DNS request

contains a AAAA record,

ADC will NAT the source

IP address to the IPv6 IP

address and change the

Destination IP to one of

the IPv6 DNS servers

Thank You

Documents

01 - Harmony_Features