Analytical Performance Analysis for HTTP over TCP

Faculty of Computer Science – Modern Science and Art University MSA

The performance analysis of communication networks needs to understand and clarify each

component of the network. In this paper, we consider and analyze in detail the transmission

network connecting the client to the server, with all the parameters affecting the transmission

time taken into consideration. The Hypertext Transmission Protocol (HTTP) is the basis for most

wide area networks ever used that is the World Wide Web (WWW). We study and analyze the

performance of HTTP protocol over the main transport protocol in the Internet, the Transmission

Control Protocol, TCP. The aim is to derive an analytical expression for the time required to

transfer one request and receive its reply. All overheads and delays caused by using TCP

connection for HTTP application are considered. The performance improvements include the

persistent connection such as P-HTTP (Persistent HTTP) and T/TCP (TCP for Transaction) are

also studied. The same analytical expression for the improved protocols are driven, and compare

the results to evaluate how these improvements affect performance.

The considered performance evaluation criteria is how much overhead is the time required for

transmitting and receiving a request/reply transaction compared to the same time in an ideal

network. The ideal network has optimum request/reply transaction time, with no handshaking, no

error losses, no queuing delay, or any other overheads that exist in real networks.

The analytical expression for the ideal network is used as a reference in computing the required

overhead ratio. Then sources of delay affecting the transmission time between the client and the

server when considering HTTP application over TCP protocols are added. These sources are the

connection setup, the slow-start, and the packet loss. The analysis considers all the parameters

affecting the transmission time such as the request size. Also different reply sizes over wide rang

of bandwidth and round trip times are included. Two percentage values of packet losses are

involved, they are 1% and 5% to complete our analytical expression.