A performance analysis of page retrieval with HTTP-MPLEX on asymmetric links

HTTP-MPLEX [1] is a header compression and response encoding scheme for HTTP. It is intended to speed up response time for multiple simultaneous HTTP transactions and improve application layer use of TCP by reducing the number of parallel connections and sustaining response bursts. HTTP- MPLEX achieves these objectives by reducing request size and prioritizing responses during multiplexing. To evaluate the performance of HTTP-MPLEX relative to HTTP 1.1 [2] in an asymmetric network environment; we developed a client and server in C++ with plug-in versions of our HTTP 1.1 and HTTP-MPLEX engines. We present in this paper a performance evaluation of our hypertext transfer engines using both the simulated network environment ns (2.29-snapshot- 20050921) and an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) connection to the Internet. We used snap-shots of www.cnn.com, www.whitehouse.gov, www.latrobe.edu.au and a photo gallery of forty eight tiles as sample web pages to retrieve using our hypertext transfer engines.