How will HTTP and DNS protocols evolve in the 5G era?

HTTP and DNS have almost become two household protocols, but with the advent of the 5G era, these protocols will undergo tremendous changes.

The Internet has grown tremendously over the past three decades thanks to two key protocols: HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and DNS, which stands for Domain Name System. HTTP is the protocol used to send data between a web browser running on a laptop or phone and the communicating web page or application running on a server on the network. No matter which web browser you use to browse which website, you can be sure that they will be able to interoperate because they all communicate using the standardized HTTP protocol. DNS is also important because it allows end-user devices to translate a given human-readable URL (such as "www.baidu.com") into a machine-usable IP address that the network can understand.

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When were these protocols created?

HTTP and DNS are standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards group. The original HTTP standard was published in 1999, roughly when the number of web pages began to grow exponentially. The original DNS standard was published in 1987 because users needed to use other applications while using a web browser, such as converting email addresses to IP addresses.

Due to the limitations of these early standards releases, new revisions to the HTTP and DNS standards were generally made every three to four years to enhance their functionality, such as improving security or stability. However, over the past few years, the update pattern for HTTP and DNS has rapidly changed from rolling out incremental features to more frequent and significant evolutionary steps.

So how will these two key protocols fare in the future?

How to support the 5G vision?

Many technical reasons have driven the changes in HTTP and DNS, however the fundamental driving force is certainly the rapid evolution of the Internet architecture towards a virtualized model. Over the past few years, we have seen many Internet applications migrate from standalone physical network servers to virtualized platforms located in huge centralized data centers. Looking ahead, we can see that the deployment of 5G networks, expected by 2020, will take this to the next level, creating new requirements for the evolution of HTTP and DNS.

The NFV and MEC trends are driving major changes to the HTTP and DNS protocols. HTTP will need to become more streamlined and lightweight to meet the high throughput and stringent latency requirements of 5G. The IETF has already started development of some key protocols, called QUIC, which stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections" over HTTP. QUIC runs HTTP directly over UDP, with a thin shim layer for encryption and flow control. This makes it run much faster than traditional HTTP and TLS, and much more secure than TCP. The main use case for QUIC is smartphones accessing content over wireless networks, where traditional HTTP/TLS/TCP has well-known performance issues that often require mobile operators to put in middleboxes called TCP optimizers to improve the mobile web browsing experience.

Similarly, with billions of IoT devices to come with 5G connectivity, DNS will create entirely new requirements for the discovery and addressing of these devices. The IETF has also begun work on some key protocol developments, such as "DNS Service Discovery," represented by DNS-SD. DNS-SD allows all devices to multicast to each other in a peer-to-peer fashion to quickly discover local devices and services. In a smart home setting, for example, this would allow a light switch to automatically control all lights without any human configuration or management steps. As a result, DNS-SD will scale more efficiently in the future than traditional DNS approaches, which require centralized query servers and a lot of manual configuration of features.

When will new protocol enhancements be implemented?

3GPP is developing the key 5G radio interface specifications, but 5G will be more than just a new radio interface. The IETF is working on the protocols and application support that will complete the 5G technology stack. Protocols like QUIC and DNS-SD are just two key examples. Interestingly, while we are all waiting for 5G radio positioning to be standardized, 5G network protocols such as QUIC and DNS-SD will not be commercially available until 5G networks are implemented in 2020.

In fact, there are benefits to these protocols being commercially available early. For example, Google has experimentally deployed QUIC in millions of Chrome browsers on smartphones, laptops, and Google servers. Most people don’t realize that when you choose to download Chrome, you are actually signing up to become a “tester” for Google’s new protocol. Performance results from such Internet-scale experiments are regularly fed back to the IETF so that the protocol can be developed rapidly. These experiments have also prompted the IETF to set 2018 as the release date for the final QUIC protocol, and of course we will also see the release of new products that support the 5G radio specification.