WebTransport and WebSockets: An Empirical Analysis of Connection Time, Message Response, and Payload Efficiency

WebTransport is a new protocol which enables the opening of a persistent connection between a client and server for bi-directional, uni-directional and datagram data exchange. The WebTransport protocol is currently in a draft state within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). WebTransport is designed to use the QUIC protocol as its transport mechanism, which provides packet ordering and delivery management. This article provides an overview of the WebTransport protocol, summarises prior work on benchmarking QUIC, and compares WebTransport and WebSockets. The findings indicate that Web-Transport does not match the performance of WebSockets with the current language implementations.