Beyond QUIC v1: A First Look at Recent Transport Layer IETF Standardization Efforts

The transport layer is ossified. With most of the research and deployment efforts in the past decade focusing on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and its extensions, the QUIC standardization by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is to be finalized in early 2021. In addition to addressing the most urgent issues of TCP, QUIC ensures its future extendibility and is destined to drastically change the transport protocol landscape. In this work, we present a first look at emerging protocols and their IETF standardization efforts beyond QUIC v1. While multiple proposed extensions improve on QUIC itself, Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption (MASQUE) as well as WebTransport present different approaches to address long-standing problems, and their interplay expands on QUIC's take to address transport layer ossification challenges.