Characterization and Prediction of QUIC's Performance Under Different Network Conditions

QUIC is a UDP-based application-level transport protocol implementing TCP-like properties. QUIC is optimized toward web activities such as HTTP and HTTPS, and is gaining rapid popularity as most Google clients use this protocol to access Google's services. However, despite its popularity, we still lack an in-depth understanding of QUIC's performance in various network environments. While the existing work evaluates QUIC in multiple scenarios, we do not have sufficient knowledge to derive a predictive performance model for QUIC and remain mainly with a few anecdotes. Based on an exploratory analysis of the effects of various parameters on QUIC's behavior, our work characterizes QUIC's performance and develops a predictive model, providing insights into the main parameters affecting QUIC's performance, such as loss, packet reordering, and latency. The resulted predictive model opens the door for future optimization and protocol design.