- Enables two-way real time communication over TCP
- Masking helps to distinguish it from standard HTTP traffic to prevent caching proxies from caching
- Nature of web sockets reduce latency from HTTP Polling or [[2501110000#HTTP Polling#HTTP Long Polling]]
- Fragmentation breaks large messages into fragments to prevent a buffer overflow
- Web sockets are initialised by exchanging specific headers which are sent from the client to server and back to establish a handshake