Measurement and Analysis: Does QUIC Outperform TCP?

Abstract

Many web applications adopt Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) as the underlying protocol, where congestion control (CC) plays a vital role in reliable transmission. However, some TCP mechanisms cannot cope with the requirements of new applications and ever-increasing network traffic. Therefore, people have proposed Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC), an excellent potential alternative based on UDP, which introduces new features to improve transmission performance and is compatible with existing CC algorithms. This paper has conducted many experiments in the testbed and actual environments to measure and compare QUIC and TCP regarding communication quality, compatibility fairness, and user experience, while considering the impacts of three typical CC algorithms: NewReno, Cubic, and BBR. QUIC outperforms TCP in most experiments for web browsing and online video, but its performance is susceptible to CC algorithms and network conditions. For example, with the Cubic algorithm, QUIC enabling the 0-RTT feature can decrease the webpages loading time by 37.11% compared with TCP. Using the BBR algorithm, both QUIC and TCP achieve high throughput, slight fluctuation, and few delayed events when playing online videos. TCP with BBR provides better fairness, while QUIC with BBR is more robust in a network with high latency or packet loss.