Evaluating QUIC’s Performance Against Performance Enhancing Proxy over Satellite Link

Geosynchronous orbit satellite broadband serves a crucial role in bridging the digital divide by connecting underserved and unserved areas where terrestrial infrastructure is infeasible. Most of the TCP implementations are not optimized for high bandwidth delay product (BDP) satellite links. TCP Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEP) have alleviated degraded TCP performance in satellite broadband. The new transport protocol, QUIC, encrypts not only payloads but also most of the transport layer header. Consequently, it is no longer feasible to accelerate transport layer performance over a high BDP satellite link. The paper performs a measurement study to compare the performance of the QUIC protocol to that of the current accelerated transport layer over a GEO satellite link. The results showed that QUIC achieves only 20% of the throughput provided by the transport layer acceleration optimized for a satellite link. It also shows the need for a complementary end-to-end loss recovery mechanism for QUIC.