rQUIC: Integrating FEC with QUIC for robust wireless communications

Abstract

QUIC, fostered by Google and under standardization in the IETF, integrates some of HTTP/s, TLS, and TCP functionalities over UDP. One of its main goals is to facilitate transport protocol design, with fast evolution and innovation. However, congestion control in QUIC is still severely jeopardized by packet losses, despite implemented loss recovery mechanisms, whose behavior strongly depends on the Round Trip Time. In this paper, we design and implement rQUIC, a framework that enables FEC within QUIC protocol to improve its performance over wireless networks. The main idea behind rQUIC is to reduce QUIC's loss recovery time by making it robust to erasures over wireless networks, as compared to traditional transport protocol loss detection and recovery mechanisms. We evaluate the performance of our solution by means of extensive simulations over different type of wireless networks and for different applications. For LTE and Wifi networks, our results illustrate significant gains of up to 60% and 25% savings in the completion time for bulk transfer and web browsing, respectively.