GMA Brandtalk
Tracking
Archives
Google experiments with ‘QUIC’ to speed up internet connection
Web too slow for you? Google is now experimenting with a new network protocol technology that can potentially make the internet connection faster.
In a blog post, Google’s Jim Roskind said QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) seeks to address the problem of round trip time (RTT) slowing down the internet.
“QUIC combines a carefully selected collection of techniques to reduce the number of round trips we need as we surf the Internet,” Roskind said.
He said that while bandwidth has been increasing, RTT has not gone down and may “remain high on mobile networks for the foreseeable future.”
Roskind said QUIC runs a stream multiplexing protocol over Transport Layer Security (TLS) on top of UDP, and not Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
Presently, he said bringing down the number of round trips to improve network performance is hard to do with protocols that presently rely on TCP.
Some advantages of QUIC include:
- 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 reconnection for mobile clients
- A pluggable congestion control mechanism
Roskind said their early tests of UDP connectivity have been "promising," but may not necessarily be so in real-world network conditions.
Testing in Chrome
He said Google's 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."
"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," he said. — LBG, GMA News
