MCQUIC - A Multicast Extension for QUIC

Multicast presents an attractive and efficient solution for streaming large-scale live media events, such as the Olympics, over the Internet. However, existing solutions face several drawbacks, particularly concerning security and privacy, which hinder their implementation in web browsers. In this paper, we introduce MCQUIC, a multicast extension to the QUIC transport protocol which addresses many of these challenges. Utilizing existing network layer multicast mechanisms, MCQUIC augments multicast delivery by providing encryption and integrity verification of packets distributed over multicast, along with automatic unicast fallback. Moreover, it operates transparently to applications and can easily be utilized by enabling a simple option in QUIC. We analyze and compare it to other delivery methods for live video, both theoretically and empirically. We are currently in the process of specifying MCQUIC at the IETF.