Evaluation of TCP wave performance applied to real HTTP traffic

TCP Wave is an innovative transport protocol adopting a burst-based transmission approach, instead of the traditional window-based one. In TCP Wave the underlying IP packet transmission process results completely changed because of an internal timer to schedule bursts, which replaces the ACK-clocked transmission of all TCP versions. So far, TCP Wave capabilities have been assessed in a large gamut of scenarios but mainly limited to unidirectional bulk-like transfers involving a TCP sender and a TCP receiver. In this paper, TCP Wave behavior and performance are evaluated for the first time with real HTTP running applications, which are characterized by: a request/response interactive traffic model, a short and, in some cases, spaced objects transmissions and a mutual role of TCP peers that can act either as sender or receiver according to the application operations. TCP Wave procedures were accurately adapted to be suitable in this scenario and will be described in details. Finally, ns-3 simulator was setup and test campaign was performed, including both a real Web server and an HTTP client.