mQUIC: Use of QUIC for Handover Support with Connection Migration in Wireless/Mobile Networks

The QUIC (formerly known as quick UDP Internet connection) protocol offers many distinct advantages over TCP, such as low-latency connection establishment, multi-streaming, and connection migration, which can be used to maintain a connection even when the associated IP address is changed due to handover. This article presents an effective approach for using connection migration of QUIC to support seamless handover for mobile clients in wireless networks, referred to as mobile QUIC (mQUIC) handover. The handover event is detected by using an error event for data transmission or a handover detection timer. Upon detection, the mobile client obtains a new IP address from its underlying routing table and performs the path validation and connection migration operations with the remote server over the newly obtained IP address. mQUIC handover can be used to provide robust and seamless handover for mobile clients in the heterogenous wireless/mobile networks. Real testbed experiments with WiFi and commercial 5G cellular networks of SK Telecom in Korea demonstrate that the proposed mQUIC handover can provide significant performance gains over the normal QUIC handover with a new connection establishment.