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The QUIC Transport Protocol: Design and Internet-Scale Deployment

Adam Langley
Al Riddoch
Alyssa Wilk
Antonio Vicente
Charles 'Buck' Krasic
Cherie Shi
Dan Zhang
Fan Yang
Feodor Kouranov
Ian Swett
Janardhan Iyengar
Jeremy Christopher Dorfman
Jim Roskind
Joanna Kulik
Patrik Göran Westin
Raman Tenneti
Robbie Shade
Ryan Hamilton
Victor Vasiliev
Wan-Teh Chang
SIGCOMM 2017 (2017)

Abstract

We present our experience with QUIC, an encrypted, multiplexed, and low-latency transport protocol designed from the ground up to improve transport performance for HTTPS traffic and to enable rapid deployment and continued evolution of transport mechanisms. QUIC has been globally deployed at Google on thousands of servers and is used to serve traffic to a range of clients including a widely-used web browser (Chrome) and a popular mobile video streaming app (YouTube). We estimate that 7% of Internet traffic is now QUIC. We describe our motivations for developing a new transport, the principles that guided our design, the Internet-scale process that we used to perform iterative experiments on QUIC, performance improvements seen by our various services, and our experience deploying QUIC globally. We also share lessons about transport design and the Internet ecosystem that we learned from our deployment.

Research Areas