Analysis of HTTP/1.1 Performance on a Wireless Network

Stephen Cheng Kevin Lai Mary Baker
{stephenc, laik, mgbaker}@cs.stanford.edu http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu


Techical Report: CSL-TR-99-778
February 1999



Computer Systems Laboratory
Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-9040



This research is supported by a gift from NTT Mobile Communications Network, Inc. (NTT DoCoMo), a graduate fellowship from the USENIX Association, and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship.

Abstract:

We compare the performance of HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 on a high latency, low bandwidth wireless network. HTTP/1.0 is known to have low throughput and consume excessive network and server resources on today's graphics-intensive web pages. A high latency, low bandwidth network only magnifies these problems. HTTP/1.1 was developed to remedy these problems. We show that on a Ricochet wireless network, HTTP/1.1 doubles throughput over HTTP/1.0 and decreases the number of packets sent by 60%.

Copyright 1999 Stephen Cheng, Kevin Lai, and Mary Baker