QUICker or not? -an Empirical Analysis of QUIC vs TCP for Video Streaming QoE Provisioning

The introduction of the QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) transport protocol by Google aimed to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) with web services compared to the prevailing Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Nowadays, QUIC has become the default protocol to communicate between the Google Chrome browser and Google servers and accounts for an increasing share of the Internet traffic. This work investigates whether the promised QoE benefits of QUIC are indeed noticeable for end users or not. A measurement study was conducted for YouTube video streaming in two mobile and two fixed access networks, in which a defined set of videos was streamed back-to-back with QUIC and TCP in randomized order. QoE factors of video streaming (such as initial delay, the visual quality of the video, and stalling) were compared statistically to find significant differences between the streaming over QUIC and the streaming over TCP. Surprisingly, no evidence for any QoE improvement of QUIC over TCP in the context of YouTube streaming could be found.