Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Experimenting with QUIC
Thursday, June 27, 2013
At Google, we're always working to make the web faster. The
SPDY protocol
, which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol, is a significant step forward. However, despite increasing bandwidth, round trip time (RTT)--which is ultimately bounded by the speed of light--is not decreasing, and will remain high on mobile networks for the foreseeable future. To continue improving network performance we need to decrease the number of round trips, something that is difficult with protocols that currently rely on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is an early-stage network protocol we are experimenting with that runs a stream multiplexing protocol over a new flavor of Transport Layer Security (TLS) on top of UDP instead of TCP. QUIC combines a
carefully selected
collection of techniques to reduce the number of round trips we need as we surf the Internet. You can learn more in the
design document
, but here are some of the highlights:
High security
similar to
TLS
Fast (often 0-RTT) connectivity similar to
TLS Snapstart
combined with
TCP Fast Open
Packet pacing to reduce packet loss
Packet error correction to reduce retransmission latency
UDP transport to avoid TCP head-of-line blocking
A connection identifier to reduce reconnections for mobile clients
A pluggable congestion control mechanism
We've been working on both a QUIC
client implementation
and
prototype server implementation
in the open source Chromium repository for the past few months. Early tests of UDP connectivity have been promising, but we have learned from past experience that real-world network conditions often differ considerably. Our next step is to test the pros and cons of the QUIC design in the real world by experimenting with using QUIC for a small percentage of Chrome dev and canary channel traffic to some Google servers, just as we did with SPDY. Users shouldn't notice any difference--except hopefully a faster load time. If we're able to identify clear performance wins, our hope is to collaborate with the rest of the community to develop the features and techniques of QUIC into network standards.
You can learn more about QUIC in our
FAQ
. Our hope is that what we learn from QUIC will ultimately help us to deliver a much faster... er... QUICker Internet!
Posted by Jim Roskind, RTT Reduction Ranger, Google
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