Company feels its UDP-based QUIC network protocol is almost ready for prime time
Over the last quarter, Google has been busy stress-testing its QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) network protocol, subjecting it to an ever increasing amount of traffic. At the moment, “roughly half of all requests from Chrome to Google servers” are being sent over QUIC. The results, the company says, are heartening and point to a tangible performance improvement over TCP.
According to a FAQ published by the search engine giant, QUIC supports multiplexed transport over UDP while guaranteeing security comparable to TLS/SSL. By relying on UDP instead of TCP, it is able to cut down on latency.
In so far as latency-sensitive services like Google Search are concerned, the UDP-based QUIC outperforms TCP through its ability to establish connections without any round trips so long as it has communicated with the server before. This is in stark contrast to how things work right now.
“The standard way to do secure web browsing involves communicating over TCP + TLS, which requires 2 to 3 round trips with a server to establish a secure connection before the browser can request the actual web page,” Google wrote in a blog post Friday.
Likewise, QUIC gets the better of TCP in poor network conditions as well, owing mainly to improved packet recovery and congestion control.
“Packet sequence numbers are never reused when retransmitting a packet. This avoids ambiguity about which packets have been received and avoids dreaded retransmission timeouts. As a result, QUIC outshines TCP under poor network conditions, shaving a full second off the Google Search page load time for the slowest 1% of connections. These benefits are even more apparent for video services like YouTube. Users report 30% fewer rebuffers when watching videos over QUIC.”
Buoyed by the results, Google has great hopes for QUIC. First, it wants to continue to increase traffic over the protocol, with the ultimate aim of entrusting it with all traffic from Google clients to Google services. Then it plans to approach the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a proposal to make the protocol an Internet standard, but says there are some changes it needs to make first, “like changing the wire format” and decoupling the current implementation from SPDY (another Google-developed protocol) and moving to QUIC-over-HTTP2.
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