Performance evaluation of SPDY over high latency satellite channels

Originally developed by Google, SPDY is an open protocol for reducing download times of content rich pages, as well as for managing channels characterized by large Round Trip Times (RTTs) and high packet losses. With such features, it could be an efficient solution to cope with performance degradations of Web 2.0 services used over satellite networks. In this perspective, this paper evaluates the SPDY protocol over a wireless access also exploiting a satellite link. To this aim, we implemented an experimental set-up, composed of an SPDY proxy, a wireless link emulator, and an instrumented Web browser. Results confirm that SPDY can enhance the performances in terms of throughput, and reduce the traffic fragmentation. Moreover, owing to its connection multiplexing architecture, it can also mitigate the transport layer complexity, which is critical when in presence of middleboxes deployed to isolate satellite trunks.