How quick is QUIC?

Abstract

HTTP has been the protocol for transferring web traffic over the Internet since the 90s. However, over the past 20 years websites have evolved so much that today this protocol does not provide optimal delivery over the Internet and became a bottleneck in decreasing page load times. Google is pioneering in finding better solutions for downloading web pages and they implemented two new protocols: SPDY in 2009 and QUIC in 2013. Since the wide range deployment of SPDY clients and servers it has been revealed that in some scenarios SPDY can negatively affect the page transfer time mainly due to the fact that the protocol is working over TCP. To tackle these obstacles QUIC uses its own congestion control and based on UDP in the transport layer. Since QUIC is a very recent protocol, this paper could help further understand its operation and performance in a wide range of network scenarios. We present a comprehensive study about the performance of QUIC, SPDY and HTTP particularly about how they affect page load time. We found that none of these protocols is clearly better than the other two and the actual network conditions determine which protocol performs the best.