What is FASP ? It is an innovative file transfer technology patented by Aspera. It is an innovative software that eliminates the fundamental shortcomings of conventional TCP based file transfer technologies such as HTTP and TCP.FASP transfers can achieve speed hundreds of times faster than FTP/HTTP.It provides a guaranteed delivery time regardless of file size, transfer distance or network conditions.

Transport characteristics● Maximum speed

Enables large data transfers over any network at maximum speed, regardless of network conditions or distance

Very lightweight, does not require specialised or powerful hardware to maintain high speeds.● Extraordinary bandwidth control

Provides precise rate control for guaranteed transfer times.

Provides fast automatic discovery of the bandwidth capacity between the source and destination.

Transport characteristics● Complete Security

Includes complete, built-in security using open standard cryptography for user authentication, data encryption and data integrity verification.

Uses standard IP networking and is implemented in software as an application protocol.● Robust and Flexible open architecture

Provides end-to-end transfer progress reporting and detailed performance statistics for monitoring and billing.

Need for FASP● In this digital world, fast and reliable movement of digital data, including massive sizes over global distances, is becoming vital business success across virtually every industry.●TCP has inherent bottlenecks in performance, especially for networks with high round-trip time and packet loss.●TCP' s Adiitive Increase Multiplicative Decrease congestion avoidance algorithm, in ramping up the, until loss occurs, AIMD inherently overdrives the available bandwidth.

Need for FASP●The loss based congestion control in TCP, AIMD has a deadly impact on throughput.●Every packet loss leads to to retransmission, and stalls the delivery of data to the receiving application until retransmission occurs.●This coupling of reliability (retransmission) to congestion control in TCP creates a severe artificial throughput penalty for file transport, as evident by the poor performancetraditional file transfer protocols built on TCP such as FTP, HTTP over wide area networks

Need for FASP●Transporting bulk data with maximum speed calls for an end-to-end approach that fully utilizes available bandwidth along the entire transfer path from data source to data destination.●Aspera fasp is an innovative bulk data transport technology built on these core principles that is intended to provide an optimal alternative to traditional TCP-based transport technologies for transferring files over public and private IP networks.

Shortcomings of TCP transfer

Fig : TCP performance over increasing network latency and packet loss conditions normally present on long-distance WANs

Shortcomings of TCP transfer●TCP file transfers are slow and bandwidth utilization of single file transfers is poor.●The bandwidth utilization problem compounds on wide area links where increased network latency combines with packet loss.●TCP file transfers over difficult networks (with high packet loss or variable latency) are extremely slow and unreliable.●TCP file transfer rates and times are unpredictable.

The FASP solution

Fig : Fasp versus TCP on a 1Gbps WAN link over increasing network latency and packet loss.

The FASP solution●fasp is a new large data transport protocol that achieves reliability in the application layer in a novel approach that eliminates TCP's inefficient loss and error handling, and the resulting erratic transfer rate swings.●fasp implements its own, theoretically proven optimal mechanism that identifies and retransmits precisely the real packet loss on the channel.●fasp has ideal bandwidth efficiency, and does not flood the network with redundant data, or deny access to standard TCP applications.

The FASP solution●Automative Adaptive Rate Control :● Whereas TCP self-limits its transfer rate even on an uncongested link, fasp™ detects the unused bandwidth and ramps up to fill it.● When congestion builds up, fasp reduces its rate to accommodate TCP traffic and equally shares the link with multiple TCP flows.● This makes fasp Loss tolerant, Perfectly efficient, and Stable.

The FASP solution● Complete security :● The fasp protocol provides complete built-in security without compromising transfer speed.● The security model, based solely on open standards cryptography, consists of SSH authentication, on-the-fly data encryption using strong cryptography (AES-128) for privacy of the transferred data, and an integrity verification per data block.● It safeguard against man-in-the-middle and anonymous UDP attacks.

The FASP solution

●Complete security :● The transfer preserves the native file system access control attributes between all supported operating systems, and is highly efficient.● With encryption enabled, fasp achieves WAN file transfers of 100-200 Mbps on a single processor machine or laptop; and 200-500 Mbps+ on dual-processor or duo-core workstations.

FASP vs FTP

Fig : FASP vs Ftp on Gigabit metropolitan and Wide Area Networks

FASP vs FTP

Fig : FASP vs FTP on inter-continental links

FASP vs FTP

Fig : FASP vs FTP over high-delay satelite links

Conclusion●The market need for a flexible, next generation file transfer technology is pervasive and

exploding as file sizes increase, network capacities grow, and users increasingly exchange

data and media.●As an all-software platform deployable on any standard computing device, fasp is capable of filling the next-generation need, providing optimal data transfer in an application, over any Internet network, from consumer broadband to gigabit core.