Internet Content Delivery Acceleration Methods for Hybrid Network Topologies

Abstract

Internet demand has been characterized by an exponential growth. Broadband Internet via satellite provides high-speed direct-to-home (DTH) Internet access. However, such systems suffer from high delay which causes degradation in the performance of protocols such as HTTP and TCP, which were developed to be used on terrestrial networks, in terms of throughput and the latency perceived by the end-user of the system.

In this thesis we investigate different versions and developments of the HTTP protocol and different algorithms and schemes in order to reduce the user's perceived latency and make browsing DTH delivered Internet a less cumbersome experience. The first of the two suggested schemes uses concurrent connections and the second scheme is a caching scheme. We show that there is a marked reduction in the perceived delay using these methods. Lastly, this thesis describes other non-mature mechanisms and their possible implementation to overcome the above-mentioned problem.