Empirical study for Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming Service based on Google Transport QUIC protocol

Abstract

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a new transport protocol developed by Google in 2012. QUIC is considered as a combination of TCP, TLS and HTTP on the top of UDP with some advantages such as reducing connection establishment time, improving congestion control, multiplexing without heads of line blocking and connection migration. In video streaming, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is tied with TCP in many years, but the video streaming using HTTP on TCP has some disadvantages in terms of head of line blocking, connection migration, etc. The emergence of QUIC resolves these drawbacks and provides some solutions to reduce the latency and improve the quality of network service with respect to QoE. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate and evaluate the performance of QUIC and traditional transport protocols in the context of video streaming using DASH services. Some QUIC parameters such as maximum congestion window, buffer size and number of emulated connections are considered to choose the appropriate parameters for video streaming. Besides, we compare the performance of QUIC with TCP in terms of some network parameters and some DASH parameters. The experimental results showed that the performance of QUIC with 2 emulated connections is not as good as TCP. When the number of emulated connections is set to 6, the number of changes in quality level and stalling events are lower than the figure for TCP. Consequently, the quality level of QUIC with 6 emulated connections is better than TCP. Moreover, the QoE score of QUIC with 6 emulated connections is higher than the figure for QUIC with 2 emulated connections and TCP.