HTTP Acceleration over High Latency Links

Broadband satellites enable Internet access for remote communities and niche markets such as ships and airplanes. However, their inherent characteristics, such as long delays and limited resources, significantly degrades the user quality-of-experience. In this paper, we propose a novel HTTP Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP) that accelerates web-browsing and improves the utilization of satellite resources. We describe TCP and HTTP optimizations, which enable this acceleration. Our performance evaluation shows an average reduction in Web page-load latency of up to 27%.