With more than two decades of service as the world’s "information
superhighway," the Internet is
long overdue for a major overhaul.

The process began with the introduction of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
– the planned next generation of the Internet Protocol that provides easier
administration, an expanded addressing scheme, and tighter security. IPv6,
which is still being implemented, promises the increased capacity necessary to
establish the "Internet of Things" where virtually every electromechanical
device will be assigned an IP address and made Internet accessible.

The next target for Internet improvement is the HyperText Transfer (HTTP)
network protocol. The goal is to minimize Internet latency
and speed up the "web experience" for users; in other words, to make the
Internet faster by creating an improved HTTP. HTTP 2.0, this new protocol
currently under discussion by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF)³, would be the first new version of HTTP since HTTP 1.1 was
described in 1999.

The initial draft of HTTP 2.0, published in November 2012, is based
upon and, in fact, is almost identical to
SPDY – a network
protocol developed by Google to reduce Internet latency. As applied to
networking, "latency" represents the amount of time it takes a data
packet to travel from source to
destination and is, thus, a measure of network speed. SPDY reduces latency
by enabling concurrent, interleaved data streams across a single Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP) connection.⁴

Importantly, SPDY does not replace HTTP; it mostly augments it.

Description

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Apple announced that Safari 8 will support SPDY, meaning all major browsers
should support SPDY by the end of 2014.

In November 2013, a

trio of Google engineers – Ilya Grigorik, Hasan Khalil,
and Roberto Peon – reported a median speed increase of between 23 and 43
percent when using SPDY instead of standard HTTP. Their exercises
incorporated a cross-section of Google functions including Google Drive,
Google Maps, Google News, and Google Sites. Google News benefited the
most, a 43 percent gain. Other functions clustered around the 25 percent
improvement level.⁸

Outlook

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Google Gains

In evaluating Google’s development and promotion
of SPDY, analyst Gregg Keizer asserts that the SPDY investment represents money
well spent. "Google’s success in promoting SPDY – and pushing
it as the foundation of [HTTP 2.0] … has been a win for the company,
particularly its revenue driver, search. The faster pages load, Google believes,
the more that people will access its services."⁹

SPDY Goals

According to Google, the high-level goals for SPDY
are:

• To target a 50 percent reduction in page load time.
• To
  minimize deployment complexity. SPDY uses TCP as the underlying
  transport layer, so requires no changes to existing networking
  infrastructure.
• To avoid
  the need for any changes to content by website authors. The only changes
  required to support SPDY are in the client user agent and web server
  applications.
• To bring
  together like-minded parties interested in exploring protocols as a way
  of solving the latency problem.

Specific technical goals include:

• To allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across a
  single TCP session.
• To reduce the bandwidth currently used by HTTP by
  compressing headers and eliminating unnecessary headers.
• To define a protocol that is easy to implement and
  server-efficient, reducing the complexity of HTTP
  by cutting down on edge cases and defining easily parsed
  message formats.
• To make SSL the underlying transport
  protocol, for better security and compatibility with
  existing network infrastructure. Although SSL does introduce
  a latency penalty, we believe that the long-term future of
  the web depends on a secure network connection. In addition,
  the use of SSL is necessary to ensure that communication
  across existing proxies is not broken.
• To enable the server to initiate
  communications with the client and push data to the client
  whenever possible.¹⁰

Note: Since the articulation of
these goals in 2009, SSL has
been superseded by the newer, but very similar, Transport Layer
Security (TLS) protocol; TLS 1.0 is effectively SSL version 3.1.

Google’s efforts to reduce Internet latency are focused on HTTP. Research should also be conducted – by Google or others – to determine if the
Transport Layer (TCP) could be modified to reduce latency.¹²
Organizations like NIST are well positioned to lead such a program.

References