Introduction

In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the popularity of the World Wide Web. The convenience of having information immediately available is indispensable. Users are able to connect to computers in all parts of the globe from their home or office. However, as the number of Web users has increased, so have the number of problems. One problem is the performance and impact on the network of HTTP/1.0, the underlying protocol for transferring Web pages. HTTP/1.1 was developed to address this problem. It aims to 1) reduce traffic on the network by only opening one persistent network connection instead of many short-lived ones, 2) improve throughput by pipelining requests, and 3) improve caching. HTTP/1.1 is backward compatible with HTTP/1.0 and is gaining wider acceptance as Netscape and Microsoft build support for it into their browsers.

The interest in the World Wide Web is only a small part of the overall trend towards greater connectivity that has permeated society. At the same time as the Web has allowed people to contact data all over the world, metropolitan area wireless and cellular networks have allowed people to remain in contact wherever they go. However, the high latency and low bandwidth of these networks have limited the freedom of users in accessing data on the Web. These networks often have high latency because they use latency-increasing link level error recovery techniques and packets often have to traverse multiple wireless hops before entering the wired part of the Internet.

Many of the networking problems which are addressed by HTTP/1.1 are magnified in a high latency network such as a wireless link. Reducing the number of packets sent and mitigating the effect of latency through pipelining would benefit a wireless network even more than its wired counterpart. We investigate the effects of HTTP/1.1 on a Metricom Ricochet wireless network and compare it with the effects on an Ethernet network.