QUIC Transport Protocol

Improving the Quic Transport Protocol

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a novel transport protocol developed to solve some of the well-known problems in Internet data transfer. We take a close look at some of the new features of the new transport protocol which was developed by Google and is currently being standardized by the IETF. To investigate the QUIC performance, we developed a QUIC implementation in the INET simulation model suite.

We explore and propose some modifications to the default QUIC featuring and show by means of simulation that these modifications improve the protocol performance.

Multiple FC mechanisms have been developed during the evolution of Internet protocols to protect receivers from being overloaded by fast senders.
However, depending on the application scenarios, these mechanisms can lead to suboptimal use of available network resources. As most of the other transport protocols, QUIC features a flow control algorithm in order to protect a receiver from buffer overflow. But in contrast to other commonly used protocols QUIC employs two levels of data flow control, namely stream level and connection level. The interaction of the stream level flow control and connection level flow control, if stream priorities are not equally weighted, is one of the important directions of our research.

We explore how flow control cooperates with congestion control and retransmission mechanisms. If it has a negative impact on the protocol performance in cases where the latter mechanisms dominate the protocol behavior.
Our work also includes an evaluation of the QUIC protocol behavior when using different CC algorithms.