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On the Performance of QUIC over Wireless Mesh Networks

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Abstract

The exponential growth in adoption of mobile phones and the widespread availability of wireless networks has caused a paradigm shift in the way we access the Internet. It has not only eased access to the Internet, but also increased users’ appetite for responsive services. New protocols to speed up Internet applications have naturally emerged. The QUIC transport protocol is one prominent case. Initially developed by Google as an experiment, the protocol has already made phenomenal strides, thanks to its support in Google’s servers and Chrome browser. Since QUIC is still a relatively new protocol, there is a lack of sufficient understanding about its behavior in real network scenarios, particularly in the case of wireless networks. In this paper we present a comprehensive study on the performance of QUIC in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). We perform a measurement campaign on a production WMN to compare the performance of QUIC against TCP when retrieving files from the Internet. Our results show that while QUIC outperforms TCP in wired networks, it exhibits significantly lower performance than TCP in the WMN. We investigate the reasons for this behavior and identify the root causes of the performance issues. We find that some design choices of QUIC may penalize the protocol in WiFi, e.g., uncovering sub-optimal interactions of QUIC with MAC layer features, such as frame aggregation. Finally, we implement and evaluate our solution and demonstrate up to 28% increase in throughput of QUIC.

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Notes

  1. Note that some WiFi parameters are implementation-specific, such as the thresholds to perform frame aggregation.

  2. https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/tcpprobe.

  3. 95% confidence bands of ECDF have been estimated via the Kolmogrov-Smirnoff approach using R package [46].

  4. OWD is measured as the timestamp difference of the corresponding packets in the tcpdump traces captured at the server and client sides.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Distributed Computing EMJD-DC program, the Spanish grant TIN2016-77836-C2-2-R, and Generalitat de Catalunya through 2017-SGR-990. This research was conducted as part of the PhD thesis which is available online at upcommons.upc.edu.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Air University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Jawad Manzoor

  2. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Jawad Manzoor & Llorenç Cerdà-Alabern

  3. Université catholique de Louvain, Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Ramin Sadre

  4. Universita degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italy

    Idilio Drago

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  1. Jawad Manzoor
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  2. Llorenç Cerdà-Alabern
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  3. Ramin Sadre
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  4. Idilio Drago
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Correspondence to Jawad Manzoor.

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Appendix A

Appendix A

1.1 QUIC Features

  • Multiplexing

    Stream multiplexing was implemented in HTTP/2 over TCP to solve the head-of-line blocking at the application layer: Even if HTTP/1.1 supports request pipelining, responses must arrive in the same order as the requests. Page rendering thus may get blocked if important requests are fired only after less important content is requested. However, HTTP/2 has only partially solved the problem and the head-of-line blocking has been passed down to the transport layer. When a packet is lost, all HTTP/2 streams are blocked and TCP buffers any subsequent packets until the successful retransmission of the lost packet. QUIC implements stream multiplexing at the transport layer. QUIC design avoids head-of-line blocking at both application and transport layer. A QUIC connection can still make progress on some streams while others are paused due to packet loss.

  • Low-latency connection establishment

    The establishment of a secure connection usually requires several round trips. Round trip latency can make a big difference on long distance links or WiFi and cellular networks. QUIC combines the transport and crypto handshake and reduces the number of round trips required for setting up a connection. It takes 3 RTT for TCP and TLS 1.2 to establish the connection with an unknown server. The first round trip is required for the three-way TCP handshake. The second round trip is required to negotiate the TLS version and the cipher suite. In the third round trip key exchange is initiated, which is used to establish the symmetric key for the session. In case of resumed connections, only 2-RTTs are required. This procedure is improved in TCP with TLS 1.3 where it takes 2-RTT for the initial connection and 1-RTT for resumed connections. QUIC further reduces this latency. It takes only 1-RTT to establish a secure connection with an unknown server using inchoate ClientHello (CHLO). It then starts application data transfer in the next round trip along with complete CHLO. Repeated connections are started with 0-RTT by sending the complete CHLO along with encrypted data directly.

  • Connection migration

    QUIC supports connection migration e.g., from WiFi to cellular because QUIC connections are identified by a 64-bit connection ID which remains the same across these migrations. On the other hand, a TCP connection is identified by a 4-tuple (source and destination IP address, source and destination port number). Therefore, TCP connection does not survive IP address changes and NAT re-bindings.

  • Header and payload encryption

    QUIC hides most of its state information by using header and payload encryption by default. While it helps in avoiding network ossification and pervasive monitoring, it comes at the cost of complicating network operations and management. Routine tasks of network operators such as detecting anomalies, capacity planning, and traffic engineering become harder due to transport layer header encryption.

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Manzoor, J., Cerdà-Alabern, L., Sadre, R. et al. On the Performance of QUIC over Wireless Mesh Networks. J Netw Syst Manage 28, 1872–1901 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-020-09563-8

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