An Experimental View on Fairness between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2

Abstract

As the modern web becomes complicated, HTTP has been upgraded from 1.1 to 2. Many web browsers and servers have adopted HTTP/2 that provides improved performance, security and bandwidth, and they support both HTTP/1.1 as well as HTTP/2 clients for the migration period. In general, HTTP/2 is considered to outperform HTTP/1.1, but it does not always guarantee the enhanced throughput. In this paper, we look into the fairness issue when HTTP/1.1 clients compete with HTTP/2 clients to connect the same web server simultaneously. From the realistic network environments such as WLAN, cellular 3G or LTE networks, we show that the HTTP/2 clients do not achieve the fair network bandwidth allocation when multiple HTTP/1.1 clients are connected to the web server.