Regarding summer of code 2008(writing device drivers)

["pankaj gupta" <beckman16%gmail.com@localhost>]

Sir,
     I am Pankaj gupta, a student of computer engineering in India.

I have an idea for a project which I named "WAN optimization through
application independent caching".

The idea is to reduce the bandwidth consumption by avoiding
re-transmission of packets between two gatways/nodes.

In a network which is connected to WAN through a gateway( or even if a
node is directly connected to internet), a lot of packet requests are
repetetive.
 I have deviced a way to avoid this re-transmission of  packet by
developing a networking device driver (at transport layer) using cache
structure in driver.

This would not be like normal browser cache. It would be a system wide
cache. Any application accessing data over network would use the cache
without knowing that it is using cache. If one application has
accessed a data once, that would be available locally to any other
application accessing the same data over network, this is another plus
point of implementing a cache  at driver level.

The  driver will be installed on  both the communicating machines, and
cache will be maintained at both the communicating machines.
Cache consists of most recently used data packets( incoming packet or
outgoing packet) passed over network stack.
 While storing the packet in cache, its MD5 checksum will be
calculated and saved along with the packet in cache. Packets will be
stored in a hash based on the MD5 checksum of packet.
Now, whenever a packet is sent from server side it will be captured by
our driver(module) and its MD5 checksum will be calculated and would
be looked-up in cache hash table.
 If a match occurs, it means packet has been sent earlier and sending
it again can be avoided if other side (which also have the same
coherent cache) can be informed  that this  particular packet which
was recieved earlier and currently is in your cache.
 So, after finding a match of MD5 checksum in its cache, server would,
instead of sending whole 1480 bytes size packet it would send only
16bytes of MD5 checksum to the other receiving machine.And other
machine would look up that particular packet in its own cache using
that MD5 checksum.

I have completed major portion of this project as my final year
project which is on WINDOWS platform. I am very eager to implement
this on UNIX platform also.

I have not sent a proposal for this project but I am waiting for your
worthful reply.

I am looking forward to your reply.



-- 
Regards
Pankaj Gupta
AIT Pune