Comparison of web transfer protocols

HTTP has been the protocol for transferring web trafficc over the Internet since the 90s. However, over the past 20 years websites have evolved so much that today this protocol does not provide optimal delivery over the Internet and became a bottleneck in decreasing page load times.

Google is pioneering in finding better solutions for downloading
web pages and they implemented two new protocols: SPDY in 2009 and
QUIC in 2013. Since the wide range deployment of SPDY clients and
servers it has been revealed that in some scenarios SPDY can negatively
aspect the page transfer time mainly due to the fact that the protocol
is working over TCP. To tackle these obstacles QUIC uses its own congestion control and based on UDP in the transport layer. Since QUIC is
a very recent protocol, as far as we know, we are the first to present a
study about it’s performance in a wide range of network scenarios.
In this paper, we brie y summarize the operation of SPDY and QUIC,
focusing on the differences compared to HTTP. Then we present a study
about the performance of QUIC, SPDY and HTTP particularly about
how they affect page load time. We found that none of these protocols
is clearly better than the other two and the actual network conditions
determine which protocol performs the best.

A kutatási beszámoló letölthető innen (PDF)

Molnár Sándor, egyetemi docens, BME, Távközlési és Médiainformatikai Tanszék, molnar@tmit.bme.hu

2015. június 15.