Publication: HTTP/2: Analysis and measurements
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2016-01
Defense date
2016-01-25
Authors
Tutors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The upgrade of HTTP, the protocol that powers the Internet of the people, was published
as RFC on May of 2015. HTTP/2 aims to improve the users experience by solving wellknow
problems of HTTP/1.1 and also introducing new features. The main goal of this
project is to study HTTP/2 protocol, the support in the software, its deployment and implementation
on the Internet and how the network reacts to an upgrade of the existing
protocol.
To shed some light on this question we build two experiments. We build a crawler
to monitor the HTTP/2 adoption across Internet using the Alexa top 1 million websites
as sample. We find that 22,653 servers announce support for HTTP/2, but only 10,162
websites are served over it. The support for HTTP/2 Upgrade is minimal, just 16 servers
support it and only 10 of them load the content of the websites over HTTP/2 on plain
TCP.
Motivated by those numbers, we investigate how the new protocol behaves with the
middleboxes along the path in the network. We build a platform to evaluate it across
67 different ports for TLS connections, HTTP/2 Upgrade and over plain TCP. Considering
both fixed line and mobile network, we use a crowdsourcing platform to recruit users.
Middleboxes affect HTTP/2, especially on port 80 for plain TCP connections. HTTP/2 Upgrades
requests are affected by proxies, failing to upgrade to the new protocol. Over TLS
on port 443 on the other hand, all the connections are successful.
Description
Keywords
Protocolos de comunicación, Comunicaciones móviles, Communication protocols, Mobile communications, HTTP, Proxies