The Experimentation and Modeling of “Satellite-Friendly” HTTP

A. Bhalekar and J. S. Baras

37th Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS), John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, March 12-14, 2003.

 

Abstract

The demand for Internet access has been characterized by an exponential growth. The introduction of high-speed satellite communication systems providing direct-to-home Internet services is a response to this increasing demand. However, such systems suffer from high delay-bandwidth product and high bit-error-rate which causes degradation in the performance of HTTP, which is a request-response type, application-layer protocol over TCP. In this paper we investigate HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1 and analyze different mechanisms to reduce the user-perceived delay and improve the performance of Internet delivery over satellite links. The paper also suggests other mechanisms, such as multiple parallel connections and a delta encoding implementation to overcome the above-mentioned problem. We show that there is a marked improvement in Internet browsability and user-perceived delay, using these methods.