Client-Server Communications Efficiency in GIS/NIS Applications : An evaluation of communications protocols and serialization formats

Abstract: Geographic Information Systems and Network Information Systems are important tools for our society, used for handling geographic spatial data and large information networks. It is therefore important to make sure such tools are of high quality. GIS/NIS applications typically deal with a lot of data, possibly resulting in heavy loads of network traffic. This work aims to evaluate two different communications protocols and serialization formats for client-server communications efficiency in GIS/NIS applications. Specifically, these are HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, Java Object Serialization and Google's Protocol Buffers. They were each implemented directly into a commercial GIS/NIS environment and evaluated by measuring two signature server calls in the system. Metrics that were examined are call duration, HTTP overhead size and HTTP payload size. The results suggest that HTTP/2 and Google's Protocol Buffers outperform HTTP/1.1 and Java Object Serialization respectively. An 87% decrease in HTTP overhead size was achieved when switching from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2. The HTTP payload size is also shown to decrease with the use of Protocol Buffers rather than Java Object Serialization, especially for communications where data consist of many different object types. Concerning call duration, the results suggest that the choice of communications protocol is more significant than the choice of serialization format for communications containing little data, while the opposite is true for communications containing much data.