Skip to main content

Evaluating the Performance of Next Generation Web Access via Satellite

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Abstract

Responsiveness is a critical metric for web performance. Update to the web protocols to reduce web page latency have been introduced by joint work between the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This has resulted in new protocols, including HTTP/2 and TCP modifications, offering an alternative to the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP/1.1). This paper evaluates the performance of the new web architecture over an operational satellite network. It presents the main features of the new protocols and discusses their impact when using a satellite network. Our tests comparing the performance of web-based applications over the satellite network with HTTP/2 confirm important reductions of page load times with respect to HTTP/1.1. However, it was also shown that performance could be significantly improved by changing the default server/client HTTP/2 configuration to best suit the satellite network.

Raffaello Secchi was funded by the European Community under its 7th Framework Programme through the Reducing Internet Transport Latency (RITE) project (ICT-317700).

Althaff Mohideen was by the RCUK Digital Economy programme of the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Rate samples were taken every 100 ms.

References

  1. Domenech, J., Pont, A., Sahuquillo, J., Gil, J.: A user-focussed evaluation of prefetching algorithms. ACM Comp. Comm. 30, 2213–2224 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Ramachandran, S.: Web Metrics: Size and number of resources (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., Frystyk, H.: Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.0. Internet-Draft draft-ietf-http-v10-spec-05, IETF Secretariat (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Fielding, R.T., et al.: Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.1. RFC 2616, RFC Editor (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Allman, M., Paxson, V., Blanton, E.: TCP Congestion Control. RFC 5681. RFC Editor (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Elkhatib, Y., Tyson, G., Welzl, M.: Can SPDY really make the web faster? In: proceedings of IFIP Networking Conference, Tronhdeim (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Peon, R., Belshe, M.: SPDY protocol - Draft 3 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Roskind, J.: QUIC (QUIC UDP Internet Connections), Multiplexed Stream Transport over UDP Google Technical report (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Belshe, M., Peon, R., Thomson, M.: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2). RFC 7540, RFC Editor (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Wang, Z.S., Balasubramanian, A., Krishnamurthy, A., Wetherall, D.: How Speedy is SPDY? In: 11th USENIX NSDI, Seattle, pp. 287–393 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Caviglione, L., Gotta, A.: SPDY over high latency satellite channels. EAI Endorsed Trans. Mobile Comm. Appl. 2, 1–10 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Luglio, M., Roseti, C., Zampognaro, F.: SPDY multiplexing approach on long-latency links. In: Proceedings of IEEE WCNC, Instanbul, pp. 3450–3455 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Luglio, M., Roseti, C., Zampognaro, F.: Resource optimization over DVB-RCS satellite links through the use of SPDY. In: Proceedingsof WiOpt, Hammamet (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Radhakrishnan, S., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Jain, A., Raghavan, B.: TCP Fast Open. In: Proceedings of ACM Conext 20133, Tokyo (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  15. WalkerSand: Quarterly Web Traffic Report. Technical report, WalkerSands Communications, Chicago (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Radhakrishnan, S., Jain, A.: TCP Fast Open. RFC 7413, RFC Editor (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Braden, B.: T/TCP - TCP Extensions for Transactions Functional Specification. RFC 1644, RFC Editor (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  18. O’Hara, B., Calhoun, P., Kempf, J.: Configuration and Provisioning for Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) Problem Statement. RFC 3990, RFC Editor (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Chu, J., Dukkipati, N., Cheng, Y., Mathis, M.: Increasing TCP’s Initial Window. RFC 6928, RFC Editor (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Dukkipati, N., et al.: An argument for increasing TCP’s initial congestion window. ACM SIGCOMM Comp. Comm. Rev. 40, 26–33 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Touch, J.: Automating the Initial Window in TCP. Internet-Draft draft-touch-tcpm-automatic-iw-03.txt, IETF Secretariat (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Avanti: Avanti Satellite Communications (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Hughes Networks: IP over Satellite (IPoS) - The Standard for Broadband over Satellite (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Jacobson, V., Braden, B., Borman, D.: TCP Extensions for High Performance. RFC 1323, RFC Editor (1992)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raffaello Secchi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social informatics and Telecommunication Engineering

About this paper

Cite this paper

Secchi, R., Mohideen, A., Fairhurst, G. (2015). Evaluating the Performance of Next Generation Web Access via Satellite. In: Pillai, P., Hu, Y., Otung, I., Giambene, G. (eds) Wireless and Satellite Systems. WiSATS 2015. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 154. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25479-1_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25479-1_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25478-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25479-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics