Demystifying Mobile Web Browsing under Multiple Protocols

TL;DR

This study evaluates how different web protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, and HTTP/2 impact mobile web page performance under various network conditions and device capabilities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive experimental analysis of web protocol performance on smartphones, including synthetic and real website testing under diverse network and device scenarios.

Findings

HTTP/2 improves page load times over HTTP/1.x

Network conditions significantly affect protocol performance

Device processing power influences web loading efficiency

Abstract

With the popularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, users prefer visiting Web pages on mobile devices. Meanwhile, HTTP(S) plays as the major protocol to deliver Web contents, and has served the Web well for more than 15 years. However, as the Web pages grow increasingly complex to provide more content and functionality, the shortcomings and inflexibility of HTTP become more and more urgent to solve, e.g., the sluggish page load, insecure content, redundant transfer, etc. SPDY and HTTP/2 are promoted to solve the shortcomings and inflexibilities of HTTP/1.x. We are interested in how Web pages perform on smartphones with different protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, and HTTP/2. In this paper, we divide our experiments into two parts. First, in order to simplify our analysis, we develop our own HTTP client ignoring complicated process in real browsers to fetch synthetic Web pages with pre-specified object sizes and object numbers with different protocols, respectively. Meanwhile, we emulate different network conditions between client and server using Traffic Control. In order to test with real browsers, we clone Alexa top 200 websites, which have the corresponding mobile version, into our local host. Meanwhile, we control mobile Chrome browser to load those Web pages with different protocols and emulate different network conditions using Traffic Control. We identify how Web page characteristics and network conditions affect Web performance on smartphones for each protocol. We also conduct experiments on a low-end device to observe if a less powerful processor could affect Web page performance for each protocol.