A Performance Comparison of QUIC vs. TCP for Web Content Delivery

Abstract

The high rate of web applications and multimedia services has increased the pressure on transport protocols with low latency, high reliability and good performance across various network conditions. Web delivery is based on an ancient protocol known as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and has issues of head-of-line blocking, multi-round handshakes, and little flexibility in the current heterogeneous networks. As an answer, Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), formalised as the transport-layer of HTTP/3, incorporates transport security, stream multiplexing and congestion control on top of UDP to avoid these restrictions. In this paper, the performance of QUIC versus TCP used in delivering web content is compared thoroughly over a controlled testbed of an experimental environment. The most crucial variables such as the page load time, end to end latency, throughput, packet loss sensitivity and connection establishment delay are tested in different bandwidth, delay, and loss conditions. The findings indicate that QUIC has been effective in minimizing the handshake latency as well as enhancing page loads, especially in high-latency and lossy networks, because of zero-round-trip connection setup and stream-level loss-recovery. TCP, though, is stable throughput in case of stable wires as well as has the advantage of established congestion control implementations. The analysis also illustrates the effect of protocol tuning as well as browser implementation on measured performance.