Performance Study of Transport Layer Protocol QUIC against TCP in GNS3 Environment

Today’s Internet has seen various applications across the web which obtain reliable, connection-oriented service from the transport layer protocol TCP. It is coupled with TLS to provide privacy and data integrity for internet communication. This model of data transfer has been the norm since secure data transfer started in the internet. However, this process for establishing secure connection requires several handshakes between client and server, and it can lead to delays. It also suffers from the problem of strict ordering of lost packets at the cost of slowing down communication. To mitigate efficiency and speed hindering issues like these, Google proposed a protocol called QUIC. It was aimed at improving speed, performance, and ease for fast adoption across devices to deliver a strong quality of experience for all users and service providers. This paper is a work on exploring and evaluating QUIC and comparing it against TCP within a simulated network using GNS3. The outcome of this study indicates that QUIC has reinforced its dexterity in networks with high packet loss percentages and has shown better resistance to such network conditions, outperforming TCP.