Google To Propose QUIC As IETF Standard

As reported by TechCrunch, "Google says it plans to propose HTTP2-over-QUIC to the IETF as a new Internet standard in the future," having disclosed a few days ago that about half of the traffic from Chrome browsers is using QUIC already. From the article: The name "QUIC" stands for Quick UDP Internet Connection. UDP's (and QUIC's) counterpart in the protocol world is basically TCP (which in combination with the Internet Protocol (IP) makes up the core communication language of the Internet). UDP is significantly more lightweight than TCP, but in return, it features far fewer error correction services than TCP. ... That's why UDP is great for gaming services. For these services, you want low overhead to reduce latency and if the server didn't receive your latest mouse movement, there's no need to spend a second or two to fix that because the action has already moved on. You wouldn't want to use it to request a website, though, because you couldn't guarantee that all the data would make it. With QUIC, Google aims to combine some of the best features of UDP and TCP with modern security tools.

Comments

Re:What is wrong with SCTP and DCCP?

[Lally Singh]

SCTP, for one, doesn't have any encryption. QUIC integrates a TLS layer into it, in a way that avoids a lot of connection setup time. The best you could do in SCTP is to put it under DTLS, which won't be as fast. Second, SCTP has horrible fragmentation behavior -- NDATA was supposed to help, but didn't make it in. It uses TCP's congestion window system over the entire association, while QUIC also has pacing. And looking at RFC2960, you'll see the names: Motorola, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Ericsson, and Telecordia. Generally someone has to pay engineers to make the standards.

As for the article, the UDP vs TCP discussion is a red herring. AFAICT, QUIC's use of UDP is for compatibility with existing IP infrastructure.