Improving Web Content Delivery with HTTP/3 and Non-Incremental EPS

TL;DR

The paper addresses web content delivery delays by leveraging HTTP/3 over QUIC and the Extensible Prioritization Scheme (EPS) to implement urgency-based, non-incremental resource delivery. It introduces two server-side prioritization mappings, Direct Mapping (DM) and Resource Type Aware Mapping (RTAM), and evaluates their impact on QoE using Lighthouse metrics across eight websites in a controlled testbed. The experimental results show general improvements in FCP, LCP, TTI, and SI, with RTAM offering additional gains in select metrics, though site-specific dependencies can cause occasional degradations. The work demonstrates the potential of EPS-enabled, non-incremental delivery to improve real-world web performance and highlights avenues for browser support and dynamic server-side prioritization to maximize QoE in diverse network and page-structure scenarios.

Abstract

HTTP/3 marks a significant advancement in protocol development, utilizing QUIC as its underlying transport layer to exploit multiplexing capabilities and minimize head-of-line blocking. The introduction of the Extensible Prioritization Scheme (EPS) offers a signaling mechanism for controlling the order of resource delivery. In this study, we propose mappings from Chromium priority hints to EPS urgency levels with the goal of enhancing the key web performance metrics. The mappings are evaluated using EPS's urgency-based, non-incremental resource delivery method. The results of the experimental evaluation show that the proposed mappings improve the Quality of Experience metrics across a range of websites.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Experimental Setup
• Figure 2: Number of Bytes per Chromium Priority per Resource Type
• Figure 3: Resource Counts and Total Sizes
• Figure 4: Resources Distribution per Website
• Figure 5: Relative Lighthouse Metrics Improvements of RTAM over Sequential Delivery