Multipath QUIC: A Deployable Multipath Transport Protocol

QUIC is the emerging transport layer protocol, providing encrypted, stream-multiplexed, low-latency data transfer. In this paper, we propose multipath-enabled QUIC (MPQUIC) to leverage multiple network interfaces, such as WiFi and LTE on today's mobile devices. We show how our MPQUIC design conceptually evolves beyond existing multipathing protocols, such as MPTCP, as it provides fine-grained stream-to-path scheduling, reduced head-of-line blocking, and faster subflow establishment. We present an userland implementation of MPQUIC that is deployable without operating system changes. Our evaluation results show that MPQUIC increases throughput in comparison to traditional QUIC, TCP and even the currently de facto multipath transport protocol MPTCP. First real world measurements confirm that MPQUIC is deployable in the Internet to reduce download times. Moreover, we show that MPQUIC's conceptual advantages over MPTCP efficiently reduce head-of-line blocking in heterogeneous environments. With multipathing support, QUIC is ready to become the universal stream transport protocol in today's Internet.