Dissecting HTTP/2 and QUIC : measurement, evaluation and optimization

The Internet is evolving from the perspective of both usage and connectivity. The meteoric rise of smartphones has not only facilitated connectivity for the masses, it has also increased their appetite for more responsive applications. The widespread availability of wireless networks has caused a paradigm shift in the way we access the Internet. This shift has resulted in a new trend where traditional applications are getting migrated to the cloud, e.g., Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps etc. As a result, modern web content has become extremely complex and requires efficient web delivery protocols to maintain users’ experience regardless of the technology they use to connect to the Internet and despite variations in the quality of users’ Internet connectivity. To achieve this goal, efforts have been put into optimizing existing web and transport protocols, designing new low latency transport protocols and introducing enhance- ments in the WiFi MAC layer. In recent years, several improvements have been introduced in the HTTP protocol resulting in the HTTP/2 standard which allows more efficient use of network resources and a reduced perception of latency. QUIC transport protocol is another example of these ambitious efforts. Initially developed by Google as an experiment, the protocol has already made phenomenal strides, thanks to its support in Google’s servers and Chrome browser. However there is a lack of sufficient understanding and evaluation of these new protocols across a range of environments, which opens new opportunities for research in this direction. This thesis provides a comprehensive study on the behavior, usage and performance of HTTP/2 and QUIC, and advances them by implementing several optimizations. First, in order to understand the behavior of HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 traffic we analyze datasets of passive measurements collected in various operational networks and discover that they have very different characteristics. This calls for a reappraisal of traf
(FSA - Sciences de l'ingénieur) -- UCL, 2019