Long ago I described how I want my cell phone to let me command it to play a recording to a caller noting that I have answered but need some time before I can talk, and also how I want the phone to stop ringing once I start fumbling for it. I learned that a few phones do have the former feature in a simple form, and it is something that is within the range of an app in some OSs but not others.

(Update: I had a formatting error in the original posting, this has been fixed.)

A few weeks ago when I wrote about the non deployment of SSL I touched on an old idea I had to make web transactions vastly more efficient. I recently read about Google's proposed SPDY protocol which goes in a completely opposite direction, attempting to solve the problem of large numbers of parallel requests to a web server by multiplexing them all in a single streaming protocol that works inside a TCP session.

While calling attention to that, let me outline what I think would be the fastest way to do very simple web transactions. It may be that such simple transactions are no longer common, but it's worth considering.

Consider a protocol where you want to fetch the contents of a URL like "www.example.com/page.html" and you have not been to that server recently (or ever.) You want only the plain page, you are not yet planning to fetch lots of images and stylesheets and javascript.

Today the way this works is pretty complex:

1. You do a DNS request for www.example.com via a UDP request to your DNS server. In the pure case this also means first asking where ".com" is but your DNS server almost surely knows that. Instead, a UDP request is sent to the ".com" master server.
2. The ".com" master server returns with the address of the server for example.com.
3. You send a DNS request to the example.com server, asking where "www.example.com is."
4. The example.com DNS server sends a UDP response back with the IP address of www.example.com
5. You open a TCP session to that address. First, you send a "SYN" packet.
6. The site responds with a SYN/ACK packet.
7. You respond to the SYN/ACK with an ACK packet. You also send the packet with your HTTP "GET" reqequest for "/page.html." This is a distinct packet but there is no roundtrip so this can be viewed as one step. You may also close off your sending with a FIN packet.
8. The site sends back data with the contents of the page. If the page is short it may come in one packet. If it is long, there may be several packets.
9. There will also be acknowledgement packets as the multiple data packets arrive in each direction. You will send at least one ACK. The other server will ACK your FIN.
10. The remote server will close the session with a FIN packet.
11. You will ACK the FIN packet.

You may not be familiar with all this, but the main thing to understand is that there are a lot of roundtrips going on. If the servers are far away and the time to transmit is long, it can take a long time for all these round trips.

It gets worse when you want to set up a secure, encrypted connection using TLS/SSL. On top of all the TCP, there are additional handshakes for the encryption. For full security, you must encrypt before you send the GET because the contents of the URL name should be kept encrypted.

A simple alternative

Consider a protocol for simple transactions where the DNS server plays a role, and short transactions use UDP. I am going to call this the "Web Transaction Protocol" or WTP. (There is a WAP variant called that but WAP is fading.)

1. You send, via a UDP packet, not just a DNS request but your full GET request to the DNS server you know about, either for .com or for example.com. You also include an IP and port to which responses to the request can be sent.
2. The DNS server, which knows where the target machine is (or next level DNS server) forwards the full GET request for you to that server. It also sends back the normal DNS answer to you via UDP, including a flag to say it forwarded the request for you (or that it refused to, which is the default for servers that don't even know about this.) It is important to note that quite commonly, the DNS server for example.com and the www.example.com web server will be on the same LAN, or even be the same machine, so there is no hop time involved.
3. The web server, receiving your request, considers the size and complexity of the response. If the response is short and simple, it sends it in one UDP packet, though possibly more than one, to your specified address. If no ACK is received in reasonable time, send it again a few times until you get one.
4. When you receive the response, you send an ACK back via UDP. You're done.

The above transaction would take place incredibly fast compared to the standard approach. If you know the DNS server for example.com, it will usually mean a single packet to that server, and a single packet coming back -- one round trip -- to get your answer. If you only know the server for .com, it would mean a single packet to the .com server which is forwarded to the example.com server for you. Since the master servers tend to be in the "center" of the network and are multiplied out so there is one near you, this is not much more than a single round trip.

Recently I wrote about the desire to provide power in every sort of cable in particular the video cable. And while we'll be using the existing video cables (VGA and DVI/HDMI) for some time to come, I think it's time to investigate new thinking in sending video to monitors. The video cable has generally been the highest bandwidth cable going out of a computer though the fairly rare 10 gigabit ethernet is around the speed of HDMI 1.3 and DisplayPort, and 100gb ethernet will be yet faster.

I suggested this as a feature for my Canon 5D SLR which shoots video, but let me expand it for all video cameras, indeed all cameras. They should all include bluetooth, notably the 480 megabit bluetooth 3.0. It's cheap and the chips are readily available.