Conclusion

Our study has shown that on a wireless network, HTTP/1.1 doubles the throughput of HTTP/1.0, while reducing the number of packets sent by 60%. We believe this significantly improves the performance seen by the user and increases the scalability of the wireless network.

In the future, wide area wirless networks are likely to remain high latency because of the inherent interference wireless networks must overcome. In addition, for these wireless networks to remain inexpensive, there will have to be many wireless routers without a wired connection to the Internet, thus causing packets to traverse several high latency wireless hops. Similarly, satellite-based wireless networks are likely to have high latency. However, these wireless networks will have greatly increased bandwidth because of more efficient use of the spectrum and the allocation of more parts of the spectrum. In such an environment, we believe that HTTP/1.1 will have even greater benefits than we have measured.