An Optimization of HTTP/2 for Mobile Applications

[Abstract] In recent years, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) spreads quickly and steadily in the usage of mobile applications as a common web protocol, so that the mobile applications can also benefit from HTTP/2, which is the new version of HTTP based on SPDY developed by Google to speed up the Internet transmission speed. HTTP/2 enables a more efficient use of network resources and a reduced perception of latency by introducing header field compression and allowing multiple concurrent exchanges on the same connection. However, what HTTP/2 focuses on is visiting websites through a browser, and mobile applications are not considered much. In this paper, firstly, mobile applications are classified based on the data flow characteristics. Based on the classification, we propose an optimization of HTTP/2 for mobile applications, called HTTP/2⁃Advance, which uses multiple Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections to multiplex HTTP requests and responses. Then we build a tiny system which simulates actual requests and responses between mobile applications and servers. We figure out the best choice of the number of multiple TCP connections for mobile applications, and compare the performance of HTTP, HTTP/2 and HTTP/2⁃Advance in both simulated and in⁃situ experiments in our system.

[Keywords] HTTP/2; HTTP optimization; multiple connection; header compression