DHTTP: an efficient and cache-friendly transfer protocol for the web

Today's HTTP carries Web interactions over client-initiated TCP connections. An important implication of using this transport method is that interception caches in the network violate the end-to-end principle of the Internet, which severely limits deployment options of these caches. Furthermore, while an increasing number of Web interactions are short, and in fact frequently carry only control information and no data, TCP is often inefficient for short interactions We propose a new transfer protocol for the Web, called Dual-Transport HTTP (DHTTP), which splits the traffic between UDP and TCP channels. When choosing the TCP channel, it is the server who opens the connection back to the client. Through server-initiated connections, DHTTP upholds the Internet end-to-end principle in the presence of interception caches, thereby allowing unrestricted caching within backbones. Moreover, the comparative performance study of DHTTP and HTTP using trace-driven simulation as well as testing real HTTP and DHTTP servers showed a significant performance advantage of DHTTP when the bottleneck is at the server and comparable performance when the bottleneck is in the network.