How Edge Computing and Initial Congestion Window Affect Latency of Web-Based Services: Early Experiences with Baidu?

Abstract

More and more things, generating huge data, will come into and enrich our lives, and the Web of Things (WoT) as a guide allows these things to be part of the World Wide Web (WWW), by using various data analysis services on the WWW. However, based on our observation on the image recognition and searching service of Baidu, pure image data transmission costs hundreds of milliseconds, besides the time of connection establishment. Inspired by the emerging Edge Computing, we analyzed the relationship between time consumption and different service provider's locations, as well as different initial congestion windows of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which affect web-based services' performance. Based on our experiments in different scenarios (i.e., initial congestion window, speed of connection device and server location), we found that pushing services to the edge of network and increasing initial congestion window, both of them can reduce latency on connection establishment and data transmission, especially when users are traveling at a high speed.