New Trends In Computer Networks
Spanning a wide spectrum of topics in computer networks, this book presents a selective collection of papers from the 20th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences, held in Istanbul, Turkey.
TABLE OF CONTENTS New Trends In Computer Networks
HTTP-MPLEX: An Application Layer Multiplexing Protocol for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
R. L. R. MATTSON AND S. GHOSH
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, E-mail: { rlmattson,somnath} @cs.latrobe.edu.au
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) has progressively increased in sophistication and scope somewhat in parallel to growth of the Internet. HTTPs first incarnation allowed for only one transaction (request and retrieval) per connection, incurring a high overhead penalty for repetitive and laborious Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection management. Progressively HTTP was optimised through the inclusion of pipelined and persistent connections1 ,2 to improve HTTPs non-optimal use of TCP. We introduce an application layer multiplexing adaptation to HTTP 1.1; HTTP-MPLEX for compressing GET requests and multiplexing responses. Our protocol is backwards compatible. It minimises verbose request header overhead, reducing the need for multiple server-client connections and allows prioritised object delivery with a companion response encoding scheme.
1. Introduction
The HTTP2 ,3 specifications do not mandate the use of any specific transport protocol. Of the litany of transport protocols available only the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)4 and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)5 are mandated transport layer protocols for Internet hosts6. However UDP does not provide ordered and guaranteed delivery, two necessary features of an HTTP transport protocol. TCP does provide such features and therefore is an obvious choice for maximizing the availability of HTTP and thus the web for Internet clients.
Historically, HTTP has not made efficient use of TCP. For each object that was to be retrieved using early implementations of HTTP a connection would be established and terminated. Connection lifetime was normally...
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