Robust QUIC: integrating practical coding in a low latency transport protocol

Abstract

We introduce rQUIC, an integration of the QUIC protocol and a coding module. rQUIC has been designed to feature different coding/decoding schemes and is implemented in go language. We conducted an extensive measurement campaign to provide a thorough characterization of the proposed solution. We compared the performance of rQUIC with that of the original QUIC protocol for different underlying network conditions as well as different traffic patterns. Our results show that rQUIC not only yields a relevant performance gain (shorter delays), especially when network conditions worsen, but also ensures a more predictable behavior. For bulk transfer (long flows), the delay reduction almost reached 70% when the frame error rate was 5%, while under similar conditions, the gain for short flows (web navigation) was approximately 55%. In the case of video streaming, the QoE gain (p1203 metric) was, approximately, 50%.This work was supported in part by the Basque Government through the Elkartek Program under the Hodei-x Project under Agreement KK-2021/00049; in part by the Spanish Government through the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) through the Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs (FIERCE) under Grant RTI2018-093475-AI00; and in part by the Industrial Doctorates Program of the University of Cantabria under Grant Call 2019