HTTP progression to 5G telecom

HTTP/2.0 path chosen in 5G wireless technology !!

Aka HTTP/2, published as RFC 7540 in May 2015.
HTTP/1.0 releases since 1995 and update by HTTP/1.1 in 1999. For last 20 years the web has transformed and evolved multifold but not HTTP protocol. During these years there were improvement done to HTTP/1.1 from web developers and browsers to improve the user experience. But these changes never made as standards and remains in their own world of web users/ developers for being experienced.

That brought difficulty in following terms,
Still not optimized enough to meet the full bandwidth utilization.
Web design/ maintenance were becoming complex as there exists multiplicity of improvements segregated around the internet.

HTTP/2.0 introduced improvements,

• Multiplexing/ Concurrency
• Stream Dependencies
• Header compression
• Server Push

In some cases, the various improvements developed on HTTP/1.1 by individual browser providers became redundant with HTTP/2.0

Best of all, there are no changes required on web design with HTTP/2.0, everything is gonna work perfectly fine with improved user experience.

Comparisons between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0

HTTP/1.1 (text protocol) Limitations

-         Allowing processing of only one outstanding request per TCP connection, forcing browsers to use multiple TCP connections to process multiple requests simultaneously.

o    However, using too many TCP connections in parallel leads to TCP congestion that causes unfair monopolization of network resources. Web browsers using multiple connections to process additional requests occupy a greater share of the available network resources, hence downgrading network performance for other users

-         The internet industry was naturally forced to hack these constraints with practices such as domain sharding, concatenation, data inlining and spriting, among others

HTTP/2.0 (binary protocol) –

SPYD (aka - speedy) – effort initiated by google (2009) with the aim to improve user experience of web browsing (reducing web page latency and increasing security). 2015 google stopped SPYD and moved its support for HTTP/2.0 standardization and improvements. SPYD does not modify HTTP, but overlay an additional layer on both ends to provide improvements such as header compression. While still retaining the semantics of HTTP/1.1, SPDY introduced a framing layer on top of TLS persistent TCP connections to achieve multiplexing and request prioritization. In addition SPDY proved reducing the amount of data exchanged through header compression, and server push feature also reduce latency further.

When IETF took notice to improve the HTTP/1.1 protocol, based on gaining improvements coming in SPYD from google. And SPYD became as foundation for HTTP/2.0 to start with.

Compression: Compared to SPDY, request and response header size were found to be smaller for HTTP/2—indicating compression achieved in HTTP/2 using HPACK is more efficient than DEFLATE algorithm used by SPDY. However, for response message size, SPDY had smaller size for textual resources. HTTP/2 header compression was found to be 75% more efficient than no header compression in HTTP/1.1.

HTTP/2 is fully multiplexed

As per 29500 Spec, HTTP2.0 recommended over TCP. JSON format is recommended to be used for data serialization over REST based APIs.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications. In most cases it is used with the HTTP protocol. RESTful applications use HTTP requests to POST (create), PUT (create and/or update), GET (e.g., make queries), and DELETE data. REST uses HTTP for all four CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format has two pieces: key and value. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.

Why 3GPP is picking up HTTP2.0 ?

3GPP - TR 29891 - section Table 6.2.2.4 -1: Comparison of candidate solutions (HTTP options) 

- This document is from CT4 (CT WG4) aspects, to study and selection of the protocols and the definition of the procedures and services that will be used in the 5GS.

QUIC (another google experimental project in parallal to TCP)

Quick UDP Internet Connections