Quicker: On the design and implementation of the QUIC protocol

Abstract

In the last decade, issues were discovered with the use of HTTP/1.1. To solve this, Google developed a new protocol, called SPDY, that was later used to create and standardize HTTP/2. However, while using and optimizing SPDY, Google found other complications that it could not correct in SPDY itself. This was due the fact that SPDY (and HTTP/2) were running on top of TCP. When using TCP as a transport protocol, middleboxes tend to interfere with the connection, the connection setup is rather slow and most of all, HOL blocking occurs when there is packet loss. As a reaction to this, Google developed Google QUIC on top of UDP, to replace TCP as a transport protocol. Because of the success of Google QUIC, the IETF decided to standardize the QUIC protocol. In this thesis, we explore the obstacles of HTTP and TCP and discuss how QUIC aims to solve these. Next we look into the various more complex features of QUIC. As part of this thesis, we have developed our own IETF QUIC server and client, called Quicker, which is up to date with draft 12 of the in-progress QUIC RFC. Consequently, when looking into the features of QUIC, we also give some insight in how we have implemented these aspects in Quicker. Afterwards, we test the interoperability of our implementation with other IETF QUIC based libraries and we modify our client to test the compliance of the standard for these same libraries. Lastly, we measure the performance of Quicker in comparison to other implementations.