QUIC-FEC: Bringing the benefits of forward erasure correction to QUIC

Abstract

Originally implemented by Google, QUIC gathers a growing interest by providing, on top of UDP, the same service as the classical TCP/TLS/HTTP/2 stack. The IETF will finalise the QUIC specification in 2019.A key feature of QUIC is that almost all its packets, including most of its headers, are fully encrypted. This prevents eavesdropping and interferences caused by middleboxes. Thanks to this feature and its clean design, QUIC is easier to extend than TCP. In this paper, we revisit the reliable transmission mechanisms that are included in QUIC. More specifically, we design, implement and evaluate Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) extensions to QUIC. These extensions are mainly intended for high-delays and lossy communications such as In-Flight Communications. Our design includes a generic FEC frame and our implementation supports the XOR, Reed-Solomon and Convolutional RLC errorcorrecting codes. We also conservatively avoid hindering the lossbased congestion signal by distinguishing the packets that have been received from the packets that have been recovered by the FEC. We evaluate its performance by applying an experimental design covering a wide range of delay and packet loss conditions with reproducible experiments. These confirm that our modular design allows the protocol to adapt to the network conditions. For long data transfers or when the loss rate and delay are small, the FEC overhead negatively impacts the download completion time. However, with high packet loss rates and long delays or smaller files, FEC allows drastically reducing the download completion time by avoiding costly retransmission timeouts. These results show that there is a need to use FEC adaptively to the network conditions.

Robust QUIC: Integrating Practical Coding in a Low Latency Transport Protocol

“…As a result, it has been contemplated in the corresponding standardization efforts, and the IRTF draft [8] focuses on how to implement a generic FEC scheme, while [9] focuses specifically on RLC. Furthermore, Michel et al presented an FEC extension with a fixed code rate, assessing its performance over constrained links [5]. This extension is subsequently converted into a portable plugin, integrated along with multipath and other transport features in the pluginized QUIC [7].…”

“…Some studies have integrated coding techniques within QUIC, with the main goal of enhancing its behavior over packet-erasure channels [5]- [9]. Although some of the preliminary results are promising, there is not yet a clear characterization of the benefits that the use of coding techniques might bring, when using QUIC over different wireless links.…”

QUIC: Opportunities and threats in SATCOM

“…Those frames can be of arbitrary length and can span a whole packet if needed. This allows to easily define extensions such as multipath [26] and Forward Erasure Correction [27], [28] to enhance QUIC performance for satellite communications. This approach would be very relevant for advising extensions to web hosting services deployed within the satellite-operator network or if these services specify their protocols depending on the characteristics of the network underneath.…”

rQUIC: Integrating FEC with QUIC for Robust Wireless Communications

“…We adopt some of their recommendations alongside with [11] for rQUIC. Recently, Michel et al have integrated FEC function-ality into QUIC [21], but they did not consider an adaptation scheme as the one promoted by rQUIC. The obtained results show that for large size files, the performance might not be as good as expected.…”