Improving Web Content Delivery with HTTP/3 and Non-Incremental EPS

HTTP/3 marks a significant advancement in protocol development, utilizing QUIC as its underlying transport layer to exploit multiplexing capabilities and minimize head-of-line blocking. The introduction of the Extensible Prioritization Scheme (EPS) offers a signaling mechanism for controlling the order of resource delivery. In this study, we introduce two mappings: Resource Type Aware Mapping (RTAM) and Direct Mapping (DM) from Chromium priority hints to EPS urgency levels with the goal of enhancing the key web performance metrics. The mappings are evaluated using EPS’s urgency-based, non-incremental resource delivery method on eight popular websites. We observe that First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Time To Interactive (TTI), and Speed Index (SI) show prominent improvements among the websites. Furthermore, RTAM outperforms DM in conjunction with non-incremental resource delivery method, achieving up to 100% improvements in Total Blocking Time (TBT) for some websites. An overall enhancement in Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics is observed across the range of websites.