QUIC meets ICN: A Versatile Wireless Transport Strategy in Multi-access Edge Environments

Information-centric Networking in edge computing environments exhibits the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency, reliability, and security of data transmission, making it a promising technology for future network deployments. However, the differences from traditional networks require applications to actively redevelop and redeploy onto edge devices, incurring additional costs for the proliferation of ICN applications. In this paper, we propose a system to adapt QUIC protocol over ICN networks in multi-access edge networks. The system aims to expand the application repertoire for ICN by providing a smooth transition of applications using QUIC to run on ICN networks. We design an ICN-QUIC conversion layer to manage the transmission of data from QUIC-based applications. We implement and evaluate the designed system. The experiment results show that, compared to existing networks, our system can enhance the transmission efficiency, i.e., up to 20 times better goodput in multicast situations, and achieves comparable results in unicast scenarios. We test the scalability of our system in real edge and wireless environments. We also deploy the real applications over the proposed system to demonstrate its compatibility in ICN and MEC environments.