ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2016, Vol. 14 ›› Issue (S1): 35-42.doi: DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2016.S1.006

• Research Paper • Previous Articles     Next Articles

An Optimization of HTTP/2 for Mobile Applications

DONG Zhenjiang1, SHUANG Kai2, CAI Yanan2, WANG Wei1, and LI Congbing1   

  1. 1. Cloud Computing & IT Research Institute, ZTE Corporation, Nanjing 210012, China;
    2. State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
  • Received:2015-07-12 Online:2016-12-01 Published:2019-11-29
  • About author:DONG Zhenjiang (dong.zhenjiang@zte.com.cn) received his MS degree in telecommunication from Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 1996. He is vice president of the Cloud Computing & IT Research Institute of ZTE Corporation. His main research areas are cloud computing, big data, new media, and mobile Internet technologies.
    SHUANG Kai (shuangk@bupt.edu.cn) received his PhD from State Key Laboratory of Networking & Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications (BUPT) in 2006. He is currently an associate professor with the BUPT. His research interests include cloud computing and the mobile Internet.
    CAI Yanan (522018144@qq.com) is a master candidate of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. Her research direction is the mobile Internet.
    WANG Wei (wang.wei8@zte.com.cn) received her MS degree from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. She is an engineer and project manager in the field of mobile Internet at the Cloud Computing and IT Research Institute of ZTE Corporation. Her research interests include new mobile Internet services and applications, PaaS, terminal application development, and other technologies. She has authored five academic papers.
    LI Congbing (li.congbing@zte.com.cn) received his MS degree from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China. He is currently a technical researcher in the field of mobile Internet and AI at the Service Research Institute of ZTE Corporation. His research interests include WebRTC, HTML5, open platform, and robot AI. He is responsible for researching mobile Internet IM services and mobile robot navigation.
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported in part by ZTE Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Funds.

PDF (PC)

Abstract: In recent years, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) spreads quickly and steadily in the usage of mobile applications as a common web protocol, so that the mobile applications can also benefit from HTTP/2, which is the new version of HTTP based on SPDY developed by Google to speed up the Internet transmission speed. HTTP/2 enables a more efficient use of network resources and a reduced perception of latency by introducing header field compression and allowing multiple concurrent exchanges on the same connection. However, what HTTP/2 focuses on is visiting websites through a browser, and mobile applications are not considered much. In this paper, firstly, mobile applications are classified based on the data flow characteristics. Based on the classification, we propose an optimization of HTTP/2 for mobile applications, called HTTP/2-Advance, which uses multiple Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections to multiplex HTTP requests and responses. Then we build a tiny system which simulates actual requests and responses between mobile applications and servers. We figure out the best choice of the number of multiple TCP connections for mobile applications, and compare the performance of HTTP, HTTP/2 and HTTP/2-Advance in both simulated and in-situ experiments in our system.

Key words: HTTP/2, TTP optimization, multiple connection, header compression