A Leaner and Faster Web: How CBOR Can Improve Dynamic Content Encoding in JSON and DNS over HTTPS
🤖 AI Summary
To address latency inflation and digital inequity caused by voluminous dynamic web content—particularly JSON and DNS over HTTPS (DoH)—this paper proposes a lightweight binary encoding scheme based on Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR). It presents the first systematic adoption of CBOR for encoding dynamic web content, introducing two CBOR-adapted DNS name compression mechanisms—one of which has been incorporated into IETF standardization efforts—and implements a minimal CBOR decoder of only 314 bytes. By restructuring DNS message formats, applying prefix/suffix compression, and conducting empirical analysis using HTTP Archive data, the approach achieves an 80.0% reduction in JSON payload size and accelerates large-object loading by 13.8%. For CBOR-encoded DNS responses, packet size is reduced by 95.5%, with up to 226 bytes saved per response through name compression.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
The Internet community has taken major efforts to decrease latency in the World Wide Web. Significant improvements have been achieved in accelerating content transport and in compressing static content. Less attention, however, has been dedicated to dynamic content compression. Such content is commonly provided by JSON and DNS over HTTPS. Aligned with the overall Web trend, dynamic content objects continue to grow in size, which increases latency and fosters the digital inequality. In this paper, we propose to counter this increase by utilizing components engineered for the constrained Internet of Things (IoT). We focus on the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and its use for dynamic content encoded in JSON or in DNS over HTTPS messages. CBOR was originally introduced to restrict packet sizes in constrained environments and enables small, effective encoding of data objects. We measure that simply switching the data representation from JSON to CBOR reduces data by up to 80.0% for a corpus of JSON objects collected via the HTTP Archive. This size reduction can decrease loading times by up to 13.8% when downloading large objects -- even in local setups. A new CBOR-based DNS message format designed for use with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over CoAP (DoC) minimizes packets by up to 95.5% in its packed form and shows large potential for additionally compressing names and addresses. We contribute two name compression schemes that apply to the new CBOR format and save up to 226 bytes in a response. The decoder for our name compression scheme is lean and can fit into as little as 314 bytes of binary build size. One of those compression schemes and further optimization proposals directly influenced further improvements of the new CBOR format within Internet standardization.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Reduces dynamic content size to lower web latency
Improves JSON and DNS over HTTPS with CBOR encoding
Compresses data for faster loading and digital equality
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Using CBOR to compress JSON and DNS over HTTPS data
Designing a new CBOR-based DNS format for DoH and DoC
Introducing name compression schemes to reduce packet sizes
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