Evaluating the Performance of Next Generation Web Access via Satellite

Responsiveness is a critical metric for web performance. Update to the web protocols to reduce web page latency have been introduced by joint work between the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This has resulted in new protocols, including HTTP/2 and TCP modifications, offering an alternative to the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP/1.1). This paper evaluates the performance of the new web architecture over an operational satellite network. It presents the main features of the new protocols and discusses their impact when using a satellite network. Our tests comparing the performance of web-based applications over the satellite network with HTTP/2 confirm important reductions of page load times with respect to HTTP/1.1. However, it was also shown that performance could be significantly improved by changing the default server/client HTTP/2 configuration to best suit the satellite network.