Quick UDP Internet Connections Research Articles

Multi-agent DRL-based Multipath Scheduling for Video Streaming with QUIC

The popularization of video streaming brings challenges in satisfying diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The multipath extension of the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol, also called MPQUIC, has the potential to improve video streaming performance with multiple simultaneously transmitting paths. The multipath scheduler of MPQUIC determines how to distribute the packets onto different paths. However, while applying current multipath schedulers into MPQUIC, our experimental results show that they fail to adapt to various receive buffer sizes of different devices and comprehensive QoS requirements of video streaming. These problems are especially severe under heterogeneous and dynamic network environments. To tackle these problems, we propose MARS, a Multi-agent deep Reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based Multipath QUIC Scheduler, which is able to promptly adapt to dynamic network environments. It exploits the MADRL method to learn a neural network for each path and generate scheduling policy. Besides, it introduces a novel multi-objective reward function that takes out-of-order queue size and different QoS metrics into consideration to realize adaptive scheduling optimization. We implement MARS in an MPQUIC prototype and deploy in Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP system. Then, we compare it with the state-of-the-art multipath schedulers in both emulated and real-world networks. Experimental results show that MARS outperforms the other schedulers with better adaptive capability regarding the receive buffer sizes and QoS.

Use of QUIC for Mobile-Oriented Future Internet (Q-MOFI)

With the proliferation of mobile devices and various mobile services, ensuring smooth mobility for users has become a major challenge. The future internet is expected to be more mobile-friendly, with advancing technologies that will transform internet management in the coming decades. These technological advancements will help address mobility issues and provide a better internet experience for mobile devices and users. The transport layer plays a crucial role in the internet protocol suite by enabling communication between applications running on different servers. However, the widely used protocols, TCP and UDP, have several limitations, such as unreliability and slow performance due to three-way handshakes. To tackle these issues, Google introduced quick UDP internet connections (QUIC). QUIC aims to enhance latency, delay, and data transmission reliability. Q-MOFI, a future internet architecture focused on mobile devices and based on QUIC, strives to achieve these goals. Moreover, it enhances throughput by implementing multiplexing. Q-MOFI outperforms traditional UDP-based MOFI in terms of throughput gains, minimizing packet loss, and reducing binding operation latency, even when the number of hosts increases. The efficiency of this model has been validated through experimental testing.

A novel anomaly detection model for secure multipath QUIC communications by jointly using empirical mode decomposition and long short-term memory networks

In the era of rapid development of modern internet technology, network transmission techniques are continuously iterating and updating. The Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol has emerged as a timely response to these advancements. Owing to the strong compatibility and high transmission speed of QUIC, its extended version, Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC), has gained popularity. MPQUIC can integrate various transmission scenarios, achieving parallel transmission with higher bandwidth. However, due to some security flaws in the protocol, MPQUIC is susceptible to attacks from anomalous network traffic. To address this issue, we propose an MPQUIC traffic anomaly detection model based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, which can decompose and denoise data and learn the long-term dependencies of the data. Simulation experiments are conducted by obtaining MPQUIC traffic data under normal and anomalous conditions for prediction, analysis, and evaluation. The results demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits satisfactory prediction performance when trained on both normal and anomalous traffic data, enabling anomaly detection. Moreover, the evaluation metrics indicate that the EMD-LSTM-based model achieves higher accuracy compared to various traditional single models.

PCC Priority: A Priority-Aware Bandwidth Allocation Framework for QUIC

The current version of QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) does not allow for prioritized bandwidth allocation of multiple streams. In this letter, we propose a novel framework, Performance-oriented Congestion Control Priority (PCC Priority), to support priority-aware bandwidth allocation of QUIC streams. Our framework incorporates stream priorities into the utility function of PCC to allocate bandwidth proportionally according to the stream priorities. We also provide an equilibrium analysis of and prove that it can allocate bandwidth proportionally based on stream priorities. Our ns-3 simulation results show that outperforms the state-of-the-art protocols in adhering to the priority settings of streams in QUIC. In particular, allocates bandwidth to streams at a ratio that is close to the ratio of their priorities and maintains competitive high throughput, low latency, and high loss tolerance.

QuicSDN: Transitioning from TCP to QUIC for southbound communication in software-defined networks

In Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), the control plane and data plane communicate for various purposes such as applying configurations and collecting statistical data. While various methods have been proposed to reduce the overhead and enhance the scalability of SDNs, the impact of the transport layer protocol used for southbound communication has not been investigated. Existing SDNs rely on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to enforce reliability. In this paper, we show that the use of TCP imposes a considerable overhead on southbound communication, identify the causes of this overhead, and demonstrate how replacing TCP with Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol can enhance the performance of this communication. We introduce the quicSDN architecture to enable southbound communication in SDNs via the QUIC protocol. We present a reference architecture based on the standard, most widely-used protocols by the SDN community and show how the controller and switch are revamped to facilitate this transition. We compare, both analytically and empirically, the performance of quicSDN versus the traditional SDN architecture and confirm the superior performance of quicSDN. Our empirical evaluations in different settings demonstrate that quicSDN lowers communication overhead and message delivery delay by up to 82% and 45%, respectively, compared to SDNs using TCP for their southbound communication.

Use of QUIC for CoAP transport in IoT networks

The QUIC protocol, formerly known as Quick UDP Internet Connection, has recently been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). While initially designed to support the transport of Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 3 (HTTP/3) messages, QUIC can also be employed for various applications. This paper explores the effective utilization of the QUIC protocol for transporting Internet of Things (IoT) messages. Specifically, we propose a proxy-based scheme that leverages the multi-streaming features of QUIC to deliver Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) messages. In the proposed scheme, multiple CoAP connections between IoT clients and a server are aggregated using client proxy and server proxy. Each CoAP connection is mapped onto a designated QUIC stream. It is noted that this proxy-based approach can be implemented without requiring modifications to existing CoAP applications at the client and server sides. Furthermore, we introduce a compressed mapping scheme from CoAP messages to QUIC streams to enhance performance within the proxy-based model. In testbed experimentation, the proposed QUIC-based CoAP transport scheme is compared with the existing UDP-based and TCP-based CoAP schemes in a variety of IoT network environment. From the experimentation results, we see that the proposed QUIC-based scheme can achieve 80% reduction in round-trip time and 9% increase in fast response rate, compared to the other candidate schemes. We can also see that the CoAP over QUIC scheme with compression provides a 10% performance gain over the case without compression.

QUIC Network Traffic Classification Using Ensemble Machine Learning Techniques

The Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol provides advantages over traditional TCP, but its encryption functionality reduces the visibility for operators into network traffic. Many studies deploy machine learning and deep learning algorithms on QUIC traffic classification. However, standalone machine learning models are subject to overfitting and poor predictability in complex network traffic environments. Deep learning on the other hand requires a huge dataset and intensive parameter fine-tuning. On the contrary, ensemble techniques provide reliability, better prediction, and robustness of the trained model, thereby reducing the chance of overfitting. In this paper, we approach the QUIC network traffic classification problem by utilizing five different ensemble machine learning techniques, namely: Random Forest, Extra Trees, Gradient Boosting Tree, Extreme Gradient Boosting Tree, and Light Gradient Boosting Model. We used the publicly available dataset with five different services such as Google Drive, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Search, and Google Music. The models were trained using a different number of features on different scenarios and evaluated using several performance metrics. The results show that Extreme Gradient Boosting Tree and Light Gradient Boosting Model outperform the other models and achieve one of the highest results among the state-of-the-art models found in the literature with a simpler model and features.

A Stream-Aware MPQUIC Scheduler for HTTP Traffic in Mobile Networks

A QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol is designed to improve Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic and carries a non-negligible portion of the traffic in the current Internet. As its extension, Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC) provides higher bandwidth and smoother network handover by using multiple network interfaces simultaneously. However, to improve HTTP traffic, there are still some issues not yet carefully addressed in the existing MPQUIC, and packet scheduling is a vital one among the issues. Specifically, existing methods fail to respond to the stream prioritization of HTTP Version 2 (HTTP/2), leading to unsatisfying web page load performance. Besides, managing asymmetric and dynamic network paths is also a challenging issue, which may result in Head-of-Line (HoL) blocking and excessive buffer usage if not effectively handled. In this paper, we present a stream-aware per-packet scheduler, HoL Blocking Eliminating Scheduler (HBES), to improve the performance of MPQUIC in mobile networks. Firstly, HBES provides a fair allocation of aggregated bandwidth for different streams based on their priority. Then, it keeps stream data arriving at the receiver in order by estimating packet arrival time to mitigate HoL blocking and excessive buffer usage. We implement HBES and evaluate its performance in various network scenarios. Experimental results verify the superiority of HBES in reducing stream completion time and buffer occupation over those existing MPQUIC schedulers.

The development of Web-based information system using quick UDP internet connection

The Academic Information System (xSIA) is built to its users to manage Study Program modules, including student academic grades. xSIA applying the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) was developed by implementing Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) technology with the HTTP/3 protocol which can demonstrate protocol transaction speed performance. The design of information systems and databases employs the Convention Over Configuration paradigm. The Prototyping Model is used to graphically represent the workflow of the system with an experimental research design. System modeling utilizes Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools, Data Base Management System (DBMS) using PostgreSQL, and UDP ports as a means of data communication. The implementation of Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) on the xSIA moodle LMS is effective for real-time communications that do not require conditions to open, maintain, or terminate connections as in streaming video conference. It is also optimal because the UDP data is transferred individually and checked for its integrity upon arrival. When a video streaming transaction last 02:36 seconds with a file size of 4.1mb, there is a significant difference of 100.98ms in the waiting time to first byte (ttfb).

The QQUIC Transport Protocol: Quantum-Assisted UDP Internet Connections.

Quantum key distribution, initialized in 1984, is a commercialized secure communication method that enables two parties to produce a shared random secret key using quantum mechanics. We propose a QQUIC (Quantum-assisted Quick UDP Internet Connections) transport protocol, which modifies the well-known QUIC transport protocol by employing quantum key distribution instead of the original classical algorithms in the key exchange stage. Due to the provable security of quantum key distribution, the security of the QQUIC key does not depend on computational assumptions. It is possible that, surprisingly, QQUIC can reduce network latency in some circumstances even compared with QUIC. To achieve this, the attached quantum connections are used as the dedicated lines for key generation.

Reinforcement Learning Based Multipath QUIC Scheduler for Multimedia Streaming.

With the recent advances in computing devices such as smartphones and laptops, most devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces such as cellular, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been the de facto standard for utilizing multipaths, and Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC), which is an extension of the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol, has become a promising replacement due to its various advantages. The multipath scheduler, which determines the path to which each packet should be transmitted, is a key function that affects the multipath transport performance. For example, the default minRTT scheduler typically achieves good throughput, while the redundant scheduler gains low latency. While the legacy schedulers may generally give a desirable performance in some environments, however, each application renders different requirements. For example, Web applications target low latency, while video streaming applications require low jitter and high video quality. In this paper, we propose a novel MPQUIC scheduler based on deep reinforcement learning using the Deep Q-Network (DQN) that enhances the quality of multimedia streaming. Our proposal first takes into account both delay and throughput as a reward for reinforcement learning to achieve a low video chunk download time. Second, we propose a chunk manager that informs the scheduler of the video chunk information, and we also tune the learning parameters to explore new random actions adequately. Finally, we implement our new scheduler on the Linux kernel and give results using the Mininet experiments. The evaluation results show that our proposal outperforms legacy schedulers by at least 20%.

Enhanced Flow Control for Low Latency in QUIC

Low-latency communication is becoming more popular as applications that demand real-time interaction, such as autonomous mobile vehicles and tactile Internet, have recently gained prominence. In this paper, we propose a fast autotuning algorithm to support low-latency communication in the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol. The transmission rate is adjusted by the fast autotuning based on the quantity of unused buffers. If the buffer has large free space, the receive window is quickly enlarged to increase the transmission rate and reduce the transmission delay. The fast autotuning is evaluated in this paper through extensive simulations, and the results show that the fast autotuning effectively reduces the transmission latency and increases throughput.

Resilient QUIC Protocol for Emerging Wireless Networks

With the development of communication technology, higher requirements of emerging services in emerging 5G-Advanced wireless network scenarios bring significant challenges to network resilience. It is difficult in conventional transport protocols like TCP and UDP to ensure resilient transmissions in heterogeneous scenarios. As an alternative to the conventional HTTP2/TCP stack, the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol can realize resilient transmission control since it supports novel features and extensions, such as multi-path transmission and connection migration. In this article, we first analyze the challenges of network resilience in several dominant 5G-Advanced wireless network scenarios with conventional protocols. To tackle these challenges, we propose the first QUIC-enabled resilient transmission control protocol, QUIC-RE5, introducing QUIC to emerging wireless scenarios. QUIC-RE5 contains three customized QUIC-based blocks that enhance the network resilience while satisfying the communication requirements in these scenarios. The experimental results prove that QUIC-RE5 improves the resilience and performance in 5G-Advanced wireless networks, compared to networks using conventional protocols and schemes.

A QoS-Based Fairness-Aware BBR Congestion Control Algorithm Using QUIC

Congestion control is a fundamental technology to balance the traffic load and the network. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol has flexible congestion control and at the same time possesses the advantages of high efficiency, low latency, and easy deployment at the application layer. Bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip propagation time (BBR) is an optional congestion control algorithm adopted by QUIC. BBR can significantly increase throughput and reduce latency, in particular over long-haul paths. However, BBR results in high packet loss in low bandwidth and low fairness in multi-stream scenarios. In this article, we propose the enhanced BBR congestion control (eBCC) algorithm, which improves the BBR algorithm in two aspects: (1) 10.87% higher throughput and 74.58% lower packet loss rate in the low-bandwidth scenario and (2) 8.39% higher fairness in the multi-stream scenario. This improvement makes eBCC very suitable for IoT communications to provide better QoS services.

QUIC vs TCP: A Performance Evaluation over LTE with NS-3

In the vast majority of mobile applications, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is still leveraged at the transport layer of the Internet’s protocol stack. But, in many cases, the performance of TCP over mobile networks has been proven sub-optimal in practice, thus causing substantial bottlenecks. Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a new protocol, currently being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that aims at solving some of the inherent problems of TCP. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of QUIC and compare the performance of QUIC and TCP in wireless networks. To compare QUIC with TCP under various transmission scenarios over LTE networks, the ns-3 network simulator has been employed. The simulations performed showed that 1) under good or average transmission conditions, QUIC is characterized by a better steady state throughput at the same time achieving quite lower file download times; and 2) under poor transmission conditions, the two protocols exhibit a similar performance.

Reachability-Based Packet Scheduler of Multipath QUIC for Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

In recent years, we need more bandwidth to enjoy entertainment contents such as video streaming, music and online gaming. To gain enough bandwidth, technologies that combine bandwidth by using multiple interfaces at same time are desired. Multipath transport protocols which combine multiple paths for packet delivery at the transport layer are a promising technology. Such protocols have a mechanism, called “packet scheduler”, to select the interface to send a packet. However, existing studies of the packet scheduler have not explicitly considered the compatibility of mobility with bonding of bandwidth. Therefore, when smartphone users move out of coverage of communication networks such as wireless Local Area Network (LAN) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) by vehicle, packet loss occurs, leading to a decrease of throughput. In this study, we propose a packet scheduler that selects an appropriate communication path so that packets can reach the peer before it moves out of the coverage. Based on routes of a vehicle and the position and communication range of the access point, the time at which a communication path will be lost is predicted. In addition, we employ MPQUIC (Multipath QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections)), which is a multipath transport protocol proposed as the extension of QUIC protocol, to reduce the ACK packet loss in multipath communication, and to reduce the time until the starts of retransmission. We evaluated the number of packet losses, the throughput and the time until starts of retransmission using a simulator and show the superiority of proposed method.

Website fingerprinting on early QUIC traffic

Cryptographic protocols have been widely used to protect the user’s privacy and avoid exposing private information. QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), including the version originally designed by Google (GQUIC) and the version standardized by IETF (IQUIC), as alternatives to the traditional HTTP, demonstrate their unique transmission characteristics: based on UDP for encrypted resource transmitting, accelerating web page rendering. However, existing encrypted transmission schemes based on TCP are vulnerable to website fingerprinting (WFP) attacks, allowing adversaries to infer the users’ visited websites by eavesdropping on the transmission channel. Whether GQUIC and IQUIC can effectively resist such attacks is worth investigating. In this paper, we study the vulnerabilities of GQUIC, IQUIC, and HTTPS to WFP attacks from the perspective of traffic analysis. Extensive experiments show that, in the early traffic scenario, GQUIC is the most vulnerable to WFP attacks among GQUIC, IQUIC, and HTTPS, while IQUIC is more vulnerable than HTTPS, but the vulnerability of the three protocols is similar in the normal full traffic scenario. Features transferring analysis shows that most features are transferable between protocols when on normal full traffic scenario, which enable the adversary to use features proven effective on a special protocol efficiently attacking a new protocol. However, combining with the qualitative analysis of latent feature representation, we find that the transferring is inefficient when on early traffic, as GQUIC, IQUIC, and HTTPS show the significantly different magnitude of variation in the traffic distribution on early traffic. By upgrading the one-time WFP attacks to multiple WFP Top-a attacks, we find that the attack accuracy on GQUIC and IQUIC reach 95.4% and 95.5%, respectively, with only 40 packets and just using simple features, whereas reach only 60.7% when on HTTPS. Finally, by conducting the attacks on flawed networks, we also demonstrate that the vulnerability of IQUIC is only slightly dependent on the network environment.

Towards a data‐driven framework for optimizing security‐efficiency tradeoff in QUIC

AbstractAdvances in computing and compression technology, coupled with high‐speed networks, has beaconed an era of video streaming on the Internet. This has led to a need to enhance the security of communications transporting data without degrading its performance. The transport layer security (TLS) protocol negotiates configurations for securing communication channels. Such conversations adversely impact latency, thereby presenting a fundamental tradeoff between security and efficiency. In this work, we present a conceptual framework, called SEC‐QUIC (Secure and Efficient Configurations for QUIC), that focuses on optimizing this tradeoff specifically for video transmissions by investigating various factors in Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC). Transport‐layer‐related elements, such as maximum transmission unit (MTU) sizes, cipher suites, and ACK timer, are examined to evaluate the impact on the security‐efficiency tradeoff in QUIC‐based video transmissions using platform‐based experiments. Subsequently, we develop a conceptual framework to leverage QUIC's dynamics based on the context of a connection to optimize the security‐efficiency tradeoff. Our findings demonstrate the need to alter default configurations based on the contextual factors of a connection (eg, resource constraints and network conditions) in QUIC‐based video transmissions to balance the tradeoff. Experiments reveal an MTU of 1400 bytes is found to have 60% better throughput compared to an MTU of 1200 bytes while also 4% less CPU usage on average for the transmission of 100 MB video files. Overall, our experiments suggest that fine‐tuning performance and security related configurations is an effective approach to optimizing the security‐efficiency tradeoff in video transmissions.

The Performance and Future of QUIC Protocol in the Modern Internet

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol is a potential replacement for the TCP protocol to transport HTTP encrypted traffic. It is based on UDP and offers flexibility, speed, and low latency. The performance of QUIC is related to the everyday web browsing experience. QUIC is famous for its Forward Error Correction (Luyi, Jinyi, & Xiaohua, 2012) and congestion control (Hari, Hariharan, & Srinivasan, 1999) algorithm that improves user browsing delay by reducing the time spent on loss recovery (Jörg, Ernst, & Don, 1998). This paper will compare QUIC with other protocols such as HTTP/2 over TCP, WebSocket, and TCP fast open in terms of latency reduction and loss recovery to determine the role of each protocol in the modern internet. Furthermore, this paper will propose potential further improvements to the QUIC protocol by studying other protocols.

Secure Communication Channel Establishment: TLS 1.3 (over TCP Fast Open) versus QUIC

Secure channel establishment protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) are some of the most important cryptographic protocols, enabling the encryption of Internet traffic. Reducing latency (the number of interactions between parties before encrypted data can be transmitted) in such protocols has become an important design goal to improve user experience. The most important protocols addressing this goal are TLS 1.3, the latest TLS version standardized in 2018 to replace the widely deployed TLS 1.2, and Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), a secure transport protocol from Google that is implemented in the Chrome browser. There have been a number of formal security analyses for TLS 1.3 and QUIC, but their security, when layered with their underlying transport protocols, cannot be easily compared. Our work is the first to thoroughly compare the security and availability properties of these protocols. Toward this goal, we develop novel security models that permit “layered” security analysis. In addition to the standard goals of server authentication and data confidentiality and integrity, we consider the goals of IP spoofing prevention, key exchange packet integrity, secure channel header integrity, and reset authentication, which capture a range of practical threats not usually taken into account by existing security models that focus mainly on the cryptographic cores of the protocols. Equipped with our new models we provide a detailed comparison of three low-latency layered protocols: TLS 1.3 over TCP Fast Open (TFO), QUIC over UDP, and QUIC[TLS] (a new design for QUIC that uses TLS 1.3 key exchange) over UDP. In particular, we show that TFO’s cookie mechanism does provably achieve the security goal of IP spoofing prevention. Additionally, we find several new availability attacks that manipulate the early key exchange packets without being detected by the communicating parties. By including packet-level attacks in our analysis, our results shed light on how the reliability, flow control, and congestion control of the above layered protocols compare, in adversarial settings. We hope that our models will help protocol designers in their future protocol analyses and that our results will help practitioners better understand the advantages and limitations of secure channel establishment protocols.