QUIC: Better for what and for whom?

Abstract

Many applications nowadays use HTTP. HTTP/2, standardised in February 2015, is an improvment of HTTP/1.1. However it is still running on top of TCP/TLS and can thus suffer from performance issues, such as the number of RTTs for the handshake phase and the Head of Line blocking. Google proposed the QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) protocol, an user level protocol, running on top of UDP, to solve those issues. Google argues that the response time (Page Load Time) is shorter and thus the end-user experience better. First papers evaluated the intrinsic performances of QUIC, but none compared QUIC with the network, the website structure and the involved actors in mind. In this paper, we present the results of our evaluation, performed on a local testbed as well as on Internet, and our analysis to identify in which conditions QUIC is of interest, which actors can benefit from having QUIC deployed in the network and what impacts QUIC can lead to.