Volume 15, Number 4

Enhancing HTTP Web Protocol Performance with Updated Transport Layer Techniques

  Authors

Ziaul Hossain¹ and Gorry Fairhurst², ¹University of Fraser Valley, Canada, ²University of Aberdeen, UK

  Abstract

Popular Internet applications such as web browsing, and web video download use HTTP protocol as application over the standard Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Traditional TCP behavior is unsuitable for this style of application because their transmission rate and traffic pattern are different from conventional bulk transfer applications. Previous works have analyzed the interaction of these applications with the congestion control algorithms in TCP and the proposed Congestion Window Validation (CWV) as a solution. However, this method was incomplete and has been shown to present drawbacks. This paper focuses on the ‘newCWV’ which was designed to address these drawbacks. NewCWV provides a practical mechanism to estimate the available path capacity and suggests a more appropriate congestion control behavior. This paper describes how this algorithm was implemented in the Linux TCP/IP stack and tested by experiments, where results indicate that, with newCWV, the browsing can get 50% faster in an uncongested network.

  Keywords

Network Protocols, HTTP, TCP, Congestion Control, newCWV, Bursty TCP traffic