On the Impact of the Multiplication Decrease Factor of QUIC

QUIC is a new transport protocol for transferring web traffic proposed by Google employing CUBIC as the default congestion control algorithm with a small but important modification where it uses a smaller congestion window reduction than the one used in the original CUBIC. Motivated by this change, in this paper we address the robustness and sensitivity of the multiplication decrease factor. More specifically, we investigate the page load time of QUIC as an impact of the multiplication decrease factor in different network environments by changing the loss rate, delay, buffer size, web page size, and bandwidth. We have found that the region where the impact of the change of the multiplication decrease factor in QUIC is pronounced when large web pages are downloaded with low round-trip time achieving 22% decrease in the page load time.