The next version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) will differ greatly from the protocol versions we have used so far.
What is HTTP?
For those who don’t know, HTTP is a hypertext transfer protocol. It is primarily used for communication between our browsers and the web servers that host the websites we visit.
Today, the versions 1.0, 1.1 and 2 of HTTP use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) protocol . TCP, as part of the layers of the IP protocol (Internet Protocol), provides reliable and controlled delivery of packets in an IP network.
TCP has been designed to include all solutions for problems that may arise and is suitable for any application that requires reliability. However, to establish a connection between the client and the server, many “beyond that»” recognition and acknowledgment packets (round trips) must precede. For a transport protocol like TCP to be considered ideal, it should perhaps be able to combine the controlled delivery of packets, as TCP does, while at the same time not performing so many round trips, reducing network latency.
What is the new protocol we will see?
Google, trying to improve web networking continuously, works on an experimental network protocol called QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections). QUIC uses the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) which operates opposite to TCP. The UDP protocol may seem unreliable as it does not check if packets reach their destination, but it is very simple to handle and more and more new protocols are being built based on it.
QUIC essentially offers the reliability of TCP using a significantly smaller number of round trips. For example, when a clientconnectsto a server, it can send and receive encrypted data using the last encrypted session. This means that new sessions are not constantly created, and there are no new round trips between the two systems.
Already, the industry that designs network protocols known as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is attempting to create a version of QUIC that deviates significantly from Google's original proposal. Google itself accepted the IETF and is currently designing a version of HTTP that will use QUIC as the protocol.
