Comparison of Present-day Transport Layer network Protocols and Google's QUIC

Abstract

In 1983, Charles Bachman defined the concept of a model having seven layers through the work at Honeywell Information Services, after which an astonishing number of single and multi-layered protocols came into the picture. Lately designed on Connectionless UDP protocol and upgraded for HTTP/2 semantics. Google is beginning to find better solutions for downloading web load time and then they came up with two new protocols: SPDY in 2009 and QUIC in 2013. QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) is a new multiplexed and secure transport protocol developed by Google and implemented in Chrome since 2013. QUIC claims to provide multiplexing and flow control equivalent to HTTP/2. QUIC implements the spirit of known TCP loss recovery mechanisms. As stated before being built with HTTP/2, also implements mechanisms that make its security equivalent to TLS and improves reliability. In this paper, we review QUIC based on the current protocols taking connection establishment, congestion control, error control, flow control and security as key parameters for comparison. We present the performance comparison of HTTP/2, TLS, SPDY and QUIC particularly based on page load time and security. Although in most cases QUIC is more efficient compared to the current protocols in certain scenarios, QUIC fails to provide the basic mechanisms it has been built for. As nascent as a protocol QUIC is we certainly hope a great deal of development in near future.