HTTP/2: Analysis and measurements

The upgrade of HTTP, the protocol that powers the Internet of the people, was published as RFC on May of 2015. HTTP/2 aims to improve the users experience by solving wellknow problems of HTTP/1.1 and also introducing new features. The main goal of this project is to study HTTP/2 protocol, the support in the software, its deployment and implementation on the Internet and how the network reacts to an upgrade of the existing protocol. To shed some light on this question we build two experiments. We build a crawler to monitor the HTTP/2 adoption across Internet using the Alexa top 1 million websites as sample. We find that 22,653 servers announce support for HTTP/2, but only 10,162 websites are served over it. The support for HTTP/2 Upgrade is minimal, just 16 servers support it and only 10 of them load the content of the websites over HTTP/2 on plain TCP. Motivated by those numbers, we investigate how the new protocol behaves with the middleboxes along the path in the network. We build a platform to evaluate it across 67 different ports for TLS connections, HTTP/2 Upgrade and over plain TCP. Considering both fixed line and mobile network, we use a crowdsourcing platform to recruit users. Middleboxes affect HTTP/2, especially on port 80 for plain TCP connections. HTTP/2 Upgrades requests are affected by proxies, failing to upgrade to the new protocol. Over TLS on port 443 on the other hand, all the connections are successful.Ingeniería Técnica en Sistemas de Telecomunicació