Performance Comparison of HTTP/3 and HTTP/2: Proxy vs. Non-Proxy Environments

2024-09-24

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This work systematically evaluates performance differences between QUIC/HTTP/3 and TCP/HTTP/2 under proxy-enhanced and high-loss, high-latency network conditions, focusing on the impact of proxy deployment and connection migration. Method: We construct a comparative experimental platform based on the QUIC protocol stack and TCP with BBR congestion control, incorporating realistic network impairments—including packet loss rates up to 10% and RTTs up to 500 ms—and conduct end-to-end latency and throughput measurements. Contribution/Results: Our study provides the first quantitative evidence that proxies improve HTTP/2 download performance by up to 90%, whereas their effect on HTTP/3 is negligible. Conversely, HTTP/3 achieves up to 88.36% higher throughput than HTTP/2 under high-loss, high-latency conditions, retaining an 81.5% advantage even under extreme packet loss. These results demonstrate HTTP/3’s superior network robustness—its performance gains are intrinsic and do not rely on proxy optimization or specific congestion control mechanisms—thereby offering empirical support for next-generation internet protocol deployment.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization
• Computer Vision: 3D Computer Vision

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

This paper systematically evaluates the performance of QUIC/HTTP3 (H3) and TCP/HTTP2 (H2) protocols in proxy-enhanced environments. H3 leverages features such as UDP-based flow-controlled streams, integrated TLS, multiplexed connections, and connection migration, offering the potential for improved web communication. Despite extensive research, the impact of proxy integration and connection migration remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by evaluating H3 and H2 across various scenarios, particularly in noisy networks and proxy setups. Our findings show that H3 excels under high loss and high latency conditions, significantly benefiting from its connection migration and multiplexing features, with improvements of up to 88.36% under high-loss and high-latency conditions, and 81.5% under extreme loss conditions, respectively. H3's connection migration remains robust, maintaining stable performance even in proxy-enhanced environments, ensuring seamless network transitions. The proxy has a more neutral impact on H3, while it significantly enhances H2 performance, particularly when paired with BBR, resulting in a 90% improvement in the single-stream file download experiment under severe network impairments. Any improvements observed in H3 under a proxy are minor and do not fundamentally alter H3's performance as they do for H2. Importantly, while H2 with the right congestion control algorithm (CCA) can achieve performance comparable to H3, H3's performance is more robust, as it is less impacted by network conditions, proxy settings, and CCA variations.

Problem

• Compare HTTP/3 and HTTP/2 performance with proxy integration
• Evaluate impact of proxies on H2 and H3 in lossy networks
• Assess H3 robustness in high-loss and high-latency conditions

Innovation

• UDP-based flow-controlled streams with built-in TLS
• Connection migration and multiplexing for robustness
• Proxy-enhanced performance with BBR congestion control