Dissecting the Applicability of HTTP/3 in Content Delivery Networks

Abstract

HTTP/3 (H3) has experienced significant growth and extensive adoption in various scenarios, especially in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Over the past few years, there have been numerous insightful studies on its deployment in industrial CDNs. However, these studies often separately analyze H3 and CDN, overlooking their synergistic integration. In this work, we explore the applicability of H3 in CDN from a holistic perspective. We analyze 325 websites hosted by seven CDN providers and identify three key characteristics where CDN align perfectly with H3's strengths. Firstly, CDN resources dominate the composition of webpages, where enabling H3 can amplify H3's benefits in connection acceleration. Secondly, CDN providers also exhibit a dominant characteristic, with the majority of CDN resources hosted by a few large providers. This phenomenon makes different webpages share the same provider. When browsing consecutively, H3 helps to skip the connection phase by resuming the connections to the same CDN provider across pages. Thirdly, H3 mitigates the congestion problem on webpages serving multiple CDN resources. This work provides a deeper insight into the applicability of H3 in large-scale distributed systems like CDNs, holding promise for informing the development and optimization of industrial H3.