This is the codebase of my Bachelor's thesis in Computer Science. The full thesis can be read here.
Many web servers still run on HTTP/1.1, a simple client-server protocol where communication is managed over a single TCP connection.
Modern web browsers open multiple such connections to multiplex data transfer. However, due to the protocol’s simplicity, problems such as head-of-line (HOL) blocking may occur.
Moreover, this architecture does not take into account certain details (e.g. file size) that could be used to improve the delivery of static HTML content.
This thesis explores the possibility of designing a different architecture in which incoming HTML requests are served based on a server-side scheduling policy such as
Shortest Connection First (SCF) or Round Robin (RR), without requiring modifications to existing open-source browsers.
To make scheduling meaningful in this context, a proxy is introduced between standard HTTP/1.1 clients and the server.
Furthermore, communication is handled using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
at the transport layer. SCTP provides a reliable, message-oriented alternative to TCP, supporting multistreaming within a single association.
The addition of the proxy endpoint also enables further optimizations, such as caching mechanisms and prefetching of embedded data in static HTML content.
The entire system was implemented in Rust. SCTP APIs were accessed in Rust using Foreign Function Interface (FFI) bindings to the
lksctp-tools C library.
Performance tests were primarily conducted by comparing the SCTP-based system to its TCP counterpart. Network load was generated using scripts written in either Python or Rust.
More details about the implementation, benchmarking, and other aspects can be found in the thesis.