DHTTP: An Efficient and Cache-Friendly Transfer Protocol for the Web

Abstract

Abstract-Today's HTTP carries Web interactions over clientinitiated TCP connections. An important implication of using this transport method is that interception caches in the network violate the end-to-end principle of the Internet, which severely limits deployment options of these caches. Furthermore, while an increasing number of Web interactions are short, and in fact frequently carry only control information and no data, TCP is often inefficient for short interactions We propose a new transfer protocol for the Web, called Dual-Transport HTTP (DHTTP), which splits the traffic between UDP and TCP channels. When choosing the TCP channel, it is the server who opens the connection back to the client. Through server-initiated connections, DHTTP upholds the Internet end-to-end principle in the presence of interception caches, thereby allowing unrestricted caching within backbones. Moreover, the comparative performance study of DHTTP and HTTP using trace-driven simulation as well as testing real HTTP and DHTTP servers showed a significant performance advantage of DHTTP when the bottleneck is at the server and comparable performance when the bottleneck is in the network.

A review of network latency optimization techniques

“…Michael Rabinovich and Hua Wang implemented Dual-Transport HTTP (DHTTP) which splits the traffic between UPD and TCP channels. This showed a significant performance improvement when the bottleneck is in the network [49]. HTTP over SCTP also benefits from faster page downloads and shorter response time [50].…”

On Wide Area Network Optimization

“…Dual-Transport HTTP (DHTTP) [67], a new transfer protocol for the web, was proposed by splitting the traffic between UDP and TCP channels based on the size of server response and network conditions. In DHTTP, there are two communication channels between a client and a server, a UDP channel and a TCP channel.…”

“…The server responds to a request of 1460 bytes or less over the UDP channel, while the response to other requests will be transmitted over the TCP channel. The performance analysis performed in [67] shows that DHTTP significantly improves the performance of Web servers, reduces user latency, and increases utilization of remaining TCP connections. However, DHTTP imposes extra requirements on firewalls and network address translation (NAT) devices.…”

“…Some focus on maximizing bandwidth utilization, others address latency, and still others address protocol inefficiency which hinders the effective delivery of packets across the WAN. The most common techniques, employed by WAN optimization to maximize application performance across the WAN, include compression [6][7][8][9][10], data deduplication [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], caching [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39], prefetching , and protocol optimization [63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]…”

Performance analysis of buffer allocation schemes under MMPP and Poisson traffic with individual thresholds

“…Web traffic has dominated the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections over the Internet today. Many studies [1][2][3][4] have shown that TCP is poorly suitable for web traffic due to its bursty, short-lived, and delay-sensitive properties [5]. As a result, it is imperative to develop efficient congestion control and buffer management schemes for effectively supporting Web traffic and investigate the impact of these schemes on network performance and Quality-of-Service (QoS).…”