Multipath QUIC: Design and Evaluation

Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) is a recent protocol initiated by Google that combines the functions of HTTP/2, TLS, and TCP directly over UDP, with the goal to reduce the latency of client-server communication. It can replace the traditional HTTP/TLS/TCP stack and the IETF has chartered a working group to standardize it. QUIC encrypts all data and most protocol headers to prevent interferences from middleboxes. Motivated by the success of Multipath TCP (MPTCP), we design Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC), a QUIC extension that enables a QUIC connection to use different paths such as WiFi and LTE on smartphones, or IPv4 and IPv6 on dual-stack hosts. We implement MPQUIC as an extension of the quic-go implementation. We evaluate the benefits of QUIC and MPQUIC by comparing them with TCP and MPTCP in a variety of settings. MPQUIC maintains MPTCP's benefits (aggregation benefit, network handover). Without packet losses, while performance of single-path TCP and single-path QUIC are similar, MPQUIC can outperform MPTCP. In lossy scenarios, (MP)QUIC is more suited than (MP)TCP.