Building cloud applications for challenged networks

Cloud computing has seen vast advancements and uptake in many parts of the world. However, many of the design patterns and deployment models are not very suitable for locations with challenged networks such as countries with no nearby datacenters. This paper describes the problem and discusses the options available for such locations, focusing specifically on community clouds as a short-term solution. The paper highlights the impact of recent trends in the development of cloud applications and how changing these could better help deployment in challenged networks. The paper also outlines the consequent challenges in bridging different cloud deployments, also known as cross-cloud computing

Performance analysis of next generation web access via satellite

Acknowledgements This work was partially funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 644334 (NEAT). The views expressed are solely those of the author(s).Peer reviewedPostprin

How the Web was Won : Keeping the computer networking curriculum current with HTTP/2

The Internet and the Web continue to grow in their pervasiveness and as new functionality and behavior emerge it is a challenge to keep the computer networking curriculum up to date. There are many excellent networking textbooks available but they cannot always keep pace with the rate of change. Recent developments in HTTP are a good example of this situation. Since around 2012 many of the web transactions between popular browsers and major web sites have been using a protocol called SPDY, which operates significantly differently from HTTP version 1.1 - the version covered in networking textbooks. SPDY has been largely adopted into the final standard of HTTP version 2. This paper seeks to fill the gap between current textbooks and the versions of HTTP now in use. It gives an overview of HTTP evolution from a technical perspective before suggesting materials and approaches that can be used as learning resources for the topic and how conceptual understanding can be reinforced through hands-on activities which use browsers' native network monitoring capabilities and other readily available tools.Postprin

Evaluating the impact of transport mechanisms on web performance for effective web access

Peer reviewedPostprin

Is there a case for parallel connections with modern web protocols?

Modern web protocols like HTTP/2 and QUIC aim to make the web faster by addressing well-known problems of HTTP/1.1 running on top of TCP. Both HTTP/2 and QUIC are specified to run on a single connection, in contrast to the usage of multiple TCP connections in HTTP/1.1. Reducing the number of open connections brings a positive impact on the network infrastructure, besides improving fairness among applications. However, the usage of a single connection may result in poor application performance in common adverse scenarios, such as under high packet losses. In this paper we first investigate these scenarios, confirming that the use of a single connection sometimes impairs application performance. We then propose a practical solution (here called H2-Parallel) that implements multiple TCP connection mechanism for HTTP/2 in Chromium browser. We compare H2-Parallel with HTTP/1.1 over TCP, QUIC over UDP, as well as HTTP/2 over Multipath TCP, which creates parallel connections at the transport layer opaque to the application layer. Experiments with popular live websites as well as controlled emulations show that H2-Parallel is simple and effective. By opening only two connections to load a page with H2-Parallel, the page load time can be reduced substantially in adverse network conditions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enabling context-aware HTTP with mobile edge hint

Due to dynamic wireless network conditions and heterogeneous mobile web content complexities, web-based content services in mobile network environments always suffer from long loading time. The new HTTP/2.0 protocol only adopts one single TCP connection, but recent research reveals that in real mobile environments, web downloading using single connection will experience long idle time and low bandwidth utilization, in particular with dynamic network conditions and web page characteristics. In this paper, by leveraging the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technique, we present the framework of Mobile Edge Hint (MEH), in order to enhance mobile web downloading performances. Specifically, the mobile edge collects and caches the meta-data of frequently visited web pages and also keeps monitoring the network conditions. Upon receiving requests on these popular webpages, the MEC server is able to hint back to the HTTP/2.0 clients on the optimized number of TCP connections that should be established for downloading the content. From the test results on real LTE testbed equipped with MEH, we observed up to 34.5% time reduction and in the median case the improvement is 20.5% compared to the plain over-the-top (OTT) HTTP/2.0 protocol