Umeå University's logo

This thesis presents an empirical analysis of the performance of WebTransport and WebSocket using the Socket.IO framework under varying network conditions. The thesis investigates two primary experiments, message round trip time and multiplexing performance, both conducted under three scenarios—perfect network (0% packet loss), moderate network (5% packet loss), and poor network (15% packet loss). The experiments were conducted on a system running Fedora 40 with a 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12600K processor and 16 GB of memory. The findings demonstrate that WebTransport mitigates Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking more effectively than WebSocket, especially in environments with degraded networks. WebTransport (Reliable) provided a significant performance advantage under suboptimal network conditions when measuring message round trip time, while WebTransport (Unreliable) consistently demonstrated slightly lower latency but with some data loss. When multiplexing, WebTransport showed significant performance benefits compared to using WebSocket.