HTTP-MPLEX: AN APPLICATION LAYER MULTIPLEXING PROTOCOL FOR THE HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL (HTTP)

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) has progressively increased in sophistication and scope somewhat in parallel to growth of the Internet. HTTPs first incarnation allowed for only one transaction (request and retrieval) per connection, incurring a high overhead penalty for repetitive and laborious Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection management. Progressively HTTP was optimised through the inclusion of pipelined and persistent connections^1,2 to improve HTTPs non-optimal use of TCP. We introduce an application layer multiplexing adaptation to HTTP 1.1; HTTP-MPLEX for compressing GET requests and multiplexing responses. Our protocol is backwards compatible. It minimises verbose request header overhead, reducing the need for multiple server-client connections and allows prioritised object delivery with a companion response encoding scheme.