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 ≈ 55%. In the case of video streaming, the QoE gain (p1203 metric) was, approximately, 50%.