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Aruba SD-WAN: BOOST in Action - 2

March 03, 2023 , ,

In this article, we are going to cover Part 2 of the BOOST feature in our LAB setup. It’s going to be around the problem network application face when there is high latency over the network. And how the BOOST TCP Acceleration feature helps to reduce the negative impact of network latency.

Aruba SD-WAN BOOST is WAN Optimization technologies

  • Network Memory: Deduplicates transmitted data to reduce bandwidth congestion so that more room can be provided for unique traffic patterns over WAN
  • TCP Acceleration:  optimizes the TCP protocol to mitigate the effect of latency by enabling local devices to transmit as fast as possible to local Appliances and not wait for acknowledgment received from the receiver across WAN.

    For more information about BOOST, you can read     here

Let’s see the TCP Acceleration in Action now.

Lab Setup

In this simple lab setup, we have two sites connected through MPLS & Internet links. Workstation 1 is the FTP Server and Workstation 2 is the client. We’ll be performing the FTP test between these two workstations to see –

1.       We’ll observe the normal time & throughput when the network conditions are normal

2.       After that we’ll increase the latency and observe the throughput & time taken to transfer the same file

3.       Finally we’ll turn on the BOOST feature and observe the network throughput with the degraded link (high latency/latency)

Figure 1: LAB Setup

Figure 2 is the output from FTP server (Workstation 1). There is approx. 300 MB of a file (300_MB) that we’ll be transferring from Workstation 1 to Workstation 2.

Figure 2: FTP Server 300_MB file exists


Figure 3: FTP Client 300_MB file removed & doesn't exist

As per the snap-shot from WAN Emulator below all the links are good without loss and latency.

Figure 4: No Latency over MPLS link (eth0)

In normal network conditions, we can see there was around 50Mbps of throughput over MPLS link. Also please not the time it took as less than a minute. Snapshot captured from the Orchestrator Appliance Chart –

Figure 5: 50Mbps NW throughput with no Latency setting


Figure 6: 53 Seconds to transfer approx.. 300MB file

It’s time to see the negative impact of the latency over MPLS link. Let’s see when the link latency is increased in 10, 20, 30 and 40ms how the throughput of the WAN decreases and the resultant time to transfer the file.

Output from the Appliance chart confirms as the latency is increased over MPLS link, the throughput of the MPLS link and the BulkApps BIO is reduced drastically. This resulted the same file to take more than the double time to transfer over wan.

Figure 7: Latency over link is increased 10-40 ms

Figure 8: Same 300_MB file took up to 2:50 Minutes time

Figure 9: Latency set to 10ms


Figure 10: Latency set to 20ms

Figure 11: Latency set to 30ms

Figure 12: Finally to 40ms Latency over MPLS

We have seen the negative impact of latency over MPLS link. Now let’s enable the BOOST feature for BulkApps. Snapshot below from orchestrator BIOS configuration confirms the BOOST is enabled for the BIO.

Figure 13: BOOST is turned ON for BulkApps

During the configuration changes the file was already transferred and you don’t see any throughput over the MPLS link. However, you can see the constant latency over MPLS link which is around 80 ms (yes that is bi-directional latency over link).  


Figure 14: No file transfer over link & 80ms Latency

Now let’s transfer the same file with BOOST feature ON. First transfer after boost took around 23 seconds and second transfer was only 7 sec.


Figure 15: BOOST enhanced the network throughput


Figure 16: Time taken to Transfer 300MB file

As demonstrated BOOST enhances the WAN throughput for TCP-based applications over the WAN link with high latency. Both the features – network memory and TCP acceleration complement the SD-WAN solution. It’s an optional but useful one and is supported across all Aruba EdgeConnect appliances. Customer who wants to start their network transformation journey with SD-WAN can protect their investment and turn on this useful feature on demand without changing the base hardware. BOOST license comes in multiple of 100Mbps and can be available to remote sites as and when required from the Pool of total BOOST capacity. Different sites can have different BOOST requirements and can be configured on demand.

This concludes our demo here. We’ll be back with more feature set overviews and demonstration articles for you. We hope you find this informative.

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