QoE Management of HTTP/2 traffic in Software-Defined Wide Area Networks
The HTTP/2 protocol introduces the concept of request prioritization, where the client manifests to the server its preferences for completing important requests more quickly. In this work, we propose that this prioritization can also occur at the network layer with the help of a software-defined network. By classifying and marking the streams, which are related to the most critical resources needed for web page rendering, as high-priority traffic, it is possible to obtain a better Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for the web users. To demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach, a prototype was built to emulate a software-defined wide area network, where paths with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) characteristics were available. The SpeedIndex and LargestContentfulPaint metrics were used to measure the QoE for the Alexa top 20 sites on the web. The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach can significantly improve the QoE in lossy environments, which are known to be challenging to the HTTP/2 protocol.