Benchmarks and Analysis of QUIC Performance on Emulab

• Author / Creator

  Muthuraj, Naveenraj

• QUIC has been a fast-evolving protocol and, with its standardization as part of HTTP/3, it is an important part of the World Wide Web. Since its introduction in 2014, QUIC changed significantly from Google QUIC (gQUIC) to an IETF standard (2021). Understanding the performance of the current version of QUIC and how it compares to the older version is important, given its evolution and increased adoption.
  We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation of two versions of QUIC against TCP: Google QUIC version 37 from 2017 (gQUICv37) and IETF QUIC version 1 from 2021 (QUICv1). Following the parameters (e.g., latency, loss, and jitter) and methodology established by a notable QUIC paper from 2017, we validate the performance of gQUICv37 and extend our experiments to QUICv1. We leverage the Emulab testbed, which facilitates reproducible research.
  We show that the performance advantages of QUIC over TCP, from core features like 0-RTT to reduce connection latency and multiple streams to avoid head-of-line (HOL) blocking, are consistent in gQUICv37 (2017) and QUICv1 (2021). There are also notable performance advantages due to the (1) new BBR congestion control algorithm and (2) updated loss detection strategy, that improve QUICv1 over gQUICv37 under packet reordering scenarios by (1) 60% to 80% and (2) 46% to 48% (using CUBIC), respectively, particularly for 10 MB objects. By utilizing Emulab and sharing our scripts and code, we enable other researchers to replicate and extend our study for future versions of QUIC.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • QUIC
  • Emulab
  • HTTP/3
  • TCP
  • HTTP/2
  • CUBIC
  • BBR

• Graduation date

  Fall 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-91dq-qc07

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.