TCP-Lite

TCP-Lite is a service that provides an alternative transport channel for TCP communications. To reduce the amount of data that is sent, the TCP-Lite service intercepts TCP communications and strips out some of the session control information.

TCP-Lite provides a simplified version of TCP that suppresses transmission of some of the TCP protocol data units (PDUs) that are used to negotiate the creation and closure of sessions. At the same time, TCP-Lite transmits all of the application data from the original channel, maintaining the order, integrity, reliability, and security of the original TCP transport.

Applications that use TCP to communicate between a client and server need no modification to use TCP-Lite. In environments in which clients require multiple or frequent session establishment, TCP-Lite reliably reduces the amount of data that is transferred between the client and server.

A TCP-Lite transport is applied to a transport profile, which is applied to a connection profile. The connection profile is a set of configuration properties that are assigned to an MNC to control the performance options between an MNC and SafeLinx Clients that connect to it.

The Table 1 lists the key properties that you can set for a TCP-Lite service:
Table 1. TCP-Lite service properties
Property Description
TCP destination port to filer on The destination port number of an application that can use TCP-Lite for transport. Only packets with the specified port number are allowed to use TCP-Lite.
IP address The destination address of an application server for which TCP-Lite transport is valid. Packets that are sent to other IP addresses cannot use TCP-Lite.
Subnet mask A bit-wise subnet mask to apply to the preceding address to define a range of destination addresses for which TCP-Lite transport is valid.
Maximum number of retransmits The number of times that a packet can be retransmitted before it is discarded and the session is reset.
Retransmit interval The time in seconds that the TCP-Lite transport waits before it retransmits a data segment whose receipt was not acknowledged.