QUIC Protocol Performance in Wireless Networks

Google's Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) transport layer protocol was developed in 2013 as a successor to its own SPDY networking protocol, which itself led to the formation of the HTTP/2 standard. QUIC's main motives were to take the advantages of TCP/IP and HTTP/2, and build them over UDP, in terms of reliability, flow control, and congestion control. The primary objective of this paper is to explore QUIC functionalities to suggest techniques to improve throughput, speedup and efficiency in wireless networks. The experimental results were established on a local test bed setup connected to a wireless access point in a campus network environment. Experimental results show that QUIC performance in the form of throughput and speedup over TCP/IP in live network environment. The fairness of QUIC in competing flow situations is also examined, and found to perform well in long life traffic. We also propose the reintroduction of FEC for minimization of retransmission latencies.