Research On The Performance Of Hypertext Transfer Protocol In Satellite Networks

Web browsing always accounts for a considerable part of the service of terrestrial networks.Therefore,it is very important to apply web transport protocols to satellite networks.One of the problems in satellite networks is that the inherent long propagation delays and the relatively high packet loss rate are challenging for the networking protocols,especially TCP.HTTP protocol over TCP is particularly impaired over satellite links.What's more,the contents of nowadays web pages are much more complicated.HTTP is not very suitable for satellite networks.HTTP/2 is based on Google's SPDY protocol and it was standardized in 2015.In the past decade,many researches have been done to improve the performance of HTTP.Quick UDP Internet protocol(QUIC),an user level protocol,running on top of UDP,was proposed by Google in 2012.QUIC is a new multiplexed and secure transport optimized for HTTP/2 semantics.The improvements of HTTP/2 and QUIC in terrestrial networks have been proved by previous researches,but few works have been done yet to evaluate the performance of HTTP/2 and QUIC in satellite networks.In this paper,for the first time we evaluate the performance of QUIC,in comparison with I-HTTP/2 and HTTPS,via satellite network access emulated on a dedicated testbed.The joint optimization performance of different transport layer and application layer is also studied.The results ot the experiments and our analysis confirm that multiplexing does help reduce the overall page retrieval time in satellite networks.The performance of HTTP/2 will degrade at high packet loss rate.It is noted that QUIC outperforms HTTP/2 and HTTPS especially when the propagation delays are long and the packet loss rates are high,which is normal for satellite communications.When QUIC applies BBR congestion control algorithm,it has a higher rate at high packet loss rate.QUIC with BBR is the best combination that we find for satellite networks.At last,we test the competitiveness of the two congestion algorithms.By comparing the performance of the three protocols in the satellite network,we analysis the beneficial mechanism for hypertext transmission in the satellite networks.It provides a reference for the special hypertext transmission protocol in the future satellite network.