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PEPsal: A TCP Performance Enhancing Proxy for satellite links
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Update 2024/08/29
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After many years of inactivity, this repository is now marked as archived.
A more recent branch is currently actively developed and maintained by the
French national space agency (CNES), in compliance with the original license
and goals of the project.

Please refer to their publicly available repository here: https://github.com/CNES/pepsal/

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PEPsal is a multi layer proxy. At the network level, it uses netfilter to intercept those 
connections that would involve a satellite links and "steals" the TCP SYN packet in 
the three-way handshake phase of a TCP connection, then pretends to be the other side of that 
connection, and initiate a new connection to the real endpoint, using a userspace application 
that directly copy data between the two sockets.

The PEPsal is classified as an integrated PEP, since it runs only on a single linux box that 
normally forwards packet between two or more networks, and can select which connections have to
Please Refer to COPYING for license.
be enhanced by means of netfilter.

The application is written in C with the use of shared memory library and netfilter ipqueue 
library. It is multi-thread and multi-task. One process, the "queuer", 
communicate with the netfilter by the ipqueue library routines. It reads every syn packet in 
the queue, annotating the information on the two endpoints in a known zone of the shared memory,
a connection array with a bitmap index for fast access, and then release the packet which 
continues its path through the netfilter chain. Just after that, our SYN packet is redirected 
by netfilter to tcp port 5000, where a TCP daemon, the "connection manager" 
is listening for it. The connecion is accepted by a dedicated "proxy server" 
process, which search in shared memory for the instance matching source address and TCP port 
of the host which has started the connection.
Once the destination IP address and port have been found in the connection array, a new TCP 
connection is attempted to real destination. When both connections are established,  the proxy 
spawns two little concurrent threads, each one reading from one TCP socket and writing all the 
data to the other one. When one of the two connections ends, the other socket is closed and the
proxy process ends.

PEPsal represents a valid solution for the degraded TCP performances when for example satellite
link are involved. It does not require modifications on content servers or satellite receivers,
it is sufficient to install a computer running PEPsal in a path which all poor performing TCP 
connection must pass through. It is designed to follow the advices given in IETF RFC3135, to 
implement a simple "TCP split" technique. The aim of PEPsal is to give a free 
alternative in the scenario of commercial "black-boxes" acting as performance 
enhancing proxies.
 


Idea and Design	: Carlo Caini <ccaini@deis.unibo.it>, 
		  Rosario Firrincieli <rfirrincieli@arces.unibo.it>
		  Daniele Lacamera <root@danielinux.net>

Author		: Daniele Lacamera <root@danielinux.net>

Co-Author	: Sergio Ammirata <sergio.ammirata@wialan.com>


Please Refer to COPYING for license.