HTTPEP: a HTTP Performance Enhancing Proxy for Satellite Systems

Broadband satellites enable Internet access for remote communities and niche markets such as ships and airplanes. However, their inherent characteristics, such as long delays and limited resources, significantly degrade the enduser’s web browsing quality-of-experience. In this paper, we propose a novel HTTP Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP) that accelerates web-browsing and improves the utilization of satellite resources. We describe HTTP optimizations, which enable this acceleration. We show that, optimizing the transport layer to the communication mechanism of a HTTP PEP gives further benefits in terms of a reduction in bandwidth usage and computing resource utilization. Our performance evaluation shows an average reduction in Web page-load latency of up to 27%.