Proxy-cache aware object bundling for Web access acceleration

In this paper, we address the acceleration of web page access through a novel proxy-cache aware object bundling technique. Richer content for a web page is always the result of increasing the number of embedded objects inside. However, due to the significant setup costs of a TCP connection, HTTP is known to be inefficient for transfers of small objects. As a result, request bundling techniques such as MGET and N-to-1 Bundle were proposed to eliminate the need for multiple requests by packing all associated embedded objects into a single bundle. However, these proposals all suffer from the lack of support from proxy caching. To address this problem, we firstly present the traffic characteristics of embedded object retrieval. This is then used as an argument upon which our proxy-cache aware PC-Bundle mechanism is built. The unique feature of our mechanism is that the advantages of all previously proposed bundle techniques can be achieved without any redundant object retrieval in the presence of proxy cache. Compared to previously proposed bundle requests such as N-to-1 Bundle, our PC-Bundle mechanism can achieve an improvement ranging from 21.2% to 34.8% for page latency reduction and 17.2% to 36.4% for page network traffic, which are very significant.