Priority-aware forward error correction for HTTP

Abstract

TCP has been replaced by QUIC in the latest version of HTTP (i.e., HTTP/3) to reduce the Head-Of-Line (HOL) blocking problem. Also, there have been improvements to HTTP's priority mechanism for Web resources, beyond the existing tree-based one, to improve page-load times. We propose that Forward Error Correction (FEC) for selected, high-priority resources, can be (re-)introduced to HTTP to further reduce HOL blocking effects and improve page-load times, while maintaining reasonable overheads. A prototype and experiment are discussed.