Research on HTTP/3: Performance, Characteristics, Issues, and Improvement Mechanisms

The HTTP/3 protocol was published as RFC 9114, based on QUIC. Due to divergences in underlying architectures and draft versions, the QUIC and HTTP/3 ecosystem has remained in an integration and transition phase for a period following their official release. During this period, HTTP/3 is characterized by multi-architecture support, version fragmentation, and implementation diversity. Since its release, systematic research has been lacking on HTTP/3’s impact on the internet ecosystem, scheduling mechanisms, performance characteristics, and resilience under adverse network conditions. A feature-driven, distributed probing-based analytical framework was designed to conduct research on HTTP/3 across multiple dimensions. It analyzes the adoption status of HTTP/3 and its distribution characteristics in different countries and regions, then explores the differences and composition of various versions under different architectures of IETF QUIC and GQUIC. We define metrics to dissect and analyze the performance characteristics of HTTP/3 under normal conditions and weak network scenarios. Furthermore, the underlying causes of performance discrepancies across different protocol versions were investigated. The analysis revealed that the deployment settings of HTTP/3 may pose potential risks such as missing identification information, nonstandard versions, and certificate verification failures. Finally, improvement measures for HTTP/3 were proposed, including enhancing the efficiency of service discovery mechanism, optimizing deployment strategies, priority design, and standardizing third-party resource dependencies.