Performance evaluation of Web browsing over hybrid fiber coaxial broad-band networks

The phenomenal growth of the Internet in recent years has motivated a number of cable operators to upgrade their wide installed base of cable networks to offer broadband data services to residential subscribers. This enables them to access a variety of local community content as well as the Internet. Current state-of-the-art cable modems implement sophisticated modulation demodulation techniques that offer services with several-fold increase in access speeds from homes compared to conventional dial-up access. But experiences show that the performance of the Web browsing may be severely hampered if the overall network configuration and its connectivity to the external world is not well-studied, e.g., connection to the USA backbone. This paper investigates the performance of Web browsing in such an environment by taking a case study of the Singapore-ONE broadband network. We present a simple model for estimating the bandwidth of overseas links for a large user base by considering HTTP as the prime application. We later analyze the performance of the HTTP protocol over such a network and propose simple modifications including changes in access subnet for better performance.