SatNex III - State-of-the-art Web Technologies and Protocols State-of-the-art Web Technologies and Protocols

Gotta A., Fairthurst G., Secchi R., Vanelli Coralli A., Collina M., Luglio M., Roseti C., Sun Z., Cruickshank H., Caviglione L.

Satellite  SPDY  TCP 

The new paradigm of web usage has motivated in recent years a series of proposals to update the standard Internet protocols related to web traffic. Some of these proposals provided suggestions to upgrade or even completely replace current Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). Others, instead, focused on new TCP transport mechanisms (larger initial window, fast connection open, congestion window validation, tail loss probe, etc.) that are meant to accelerate the completion time of short data transfers. Web technologies are penetrating areas of computer-science before only the prerogative of dedicated computer systems, such as Cloud computing and Service- oriented applications. Web technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent as the delivery model for a wide range of applications, using methods such as Service- oriented architecture (SOA) or software as a service (SaaS). These methods implement the concept of ASP (application service provider) and on-demand computing software delivery: the provider hosts commercially available software and delivers copies of it over the Web, customising the software according to a client's needs. These changes are driving significant alterations in the traffic patterns generated by applications, but the impact of such changes are still uncertain. These changes are also set to change the requirements placed on a network - with an increasing emphasis on minimising web page download time, and an increasing need to consider on-off interactivity. The motivation for transport changes is a growing availability of high speed xDSL/cable access. These high-speed services differ from most wireless and satellite systems in key ways. Current wireless/satellite systems typically employ dynamic capacity schemes with protocol accelerators and access methods that have been tuned for the existing web traffic. The traffic patterns and protocol behaviour of new web protocols is very different. It is therefore important to assess the implications on the design and operation of satellite systems as the new web is increasingly used. This is the focus of this document. The document (TN3.1) reviews the current state-of-the-art of web technologies and surveys the recent proposals, such as SDPY. This document reviews the problems these protocols are trying to solve, and notes the way they try to solve them. In particular, the HTTP/2.0 standard is a new Internet application-layer that defines a new semantic. This is presently a joint effort between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The starting point for the standard inherits ideas from SPDY, an open standard developed by Google and currently available in a wide range of web browsers, including Chromium, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. HTTP/2.0 promises to reduce web page load latency and improve web security using a combination of techniques, including compression, and multiplexing.

Source: Project report, SatNEx III, 2014