Csep-561-Reading-7A

The QUIC Transport Protocol: Design and Internet-Scale Deployment

QUIC solves numerous problems with the current TCP/TLS ecosystem; some of the noteworthy improvements are:

• As discussed in class, middleboxes like NATs have broken the network layer separation, and have made upgrades to TCP extremely time consuming and inefficient. QUIC sidesteps this by sitting on top of UDP. While upgrades to QUIC can require updates to applications like Chrome and YouTube, these are easier and faster than waiting for entire OS or middlebox upgrades across a network. QUIC even goes so far as to encrypt its headers, so middleboxes won't have the opportunity to meddle as they have done with TCP.
• There are a number of handshake delays in the current state-of-the-art, one RTT for the TCP connection handshake and two RTTs for the TLS handshake. As discussed earlier in the class, as bandwidths get larger, these delays start to dominate the performance impact.
  A server supporting QUIC accomplishes an easy connection by allowing discovery from an HTTP client request. The server makes the option known by using the Alt-Svc header, from which the client can issue both QUIC and TLS/TCP requests, and opt for QUIC if it succeeds.