Abstract
Despite its widespread adoption and popularity, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) suffers from fundamental performance limitations. SPDY, a recently proposed alternative to HTTP, tries to address many of the limitations of HTTP (e.g., multiple connections, setup latency). With cellular networks fast becoming the communication channel of choice, we perform a detailed measurement study to understand the benefits of using SPDY over cellular networks. Through careful measurements conducted over four months, we provide a detailed analysis of the performance of HTTP and SPDY, how they interact with the various layers, and their implications on web design. Our results show that unlike in wired and 802.11 networks, SPDY does not clearly outperform HTTP over cellular networks. We identify, as the underlying cause, a lack of harmony between how TCP and cellular networks interact. In particular, the performance of most TCP implementations is impacted by their implicit assumption that the network round-trip latency does not change after an idle period, which is typically not the case in cellular networks. This causes spurious retransmissions and degraded throughput for both HTTP and SPDY. We conclude that a viable solution has to account for these unique cross-layer dependencies to achieve improved performance over cellular networks.
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