WWW performance over GPRS

We present investigative results of HTTP performance over GPRS (General Packet Radio Service). Following on from an earlier study of GPRS, in which we uncovered a number of performance problems with TCP (e.g. sub-optimal start-up performance, excess queueing, spurious timeouts etc.), we discuss how and to what extent these limitations can impact HTTP. We also examine some other issues specifically linked to HTTP performance over GPRS. Our experimental results show that aggressive behaviour on the part of Web browsers optimized for the wired-Internet does not work well over GPRS. Instead, limiting the number of browser TCP connections, which enables aggressive pipelining of requests, can give significant performance benefits. We show that using a proxy located close to the wired-wireless boundary that implements performance enhancements at both the transport (TCP) and application layer can lead to substantial reduction in Web page download times over GPRS.