A Performance Perspective on Web Optimized Protocol Stacks: TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 vs. QUIC

Abstract

Existing performance comparisons of QUIC and TCP compared an optimized QUIC to an unoptimized TCP stack. By neglecting available TCP improvements inherently included in QUIC, comparisons do not shed light on the performance of current web stacks. In this paper, we can show that tuning TCP parameters is not negligible and directly yields significant improvements. Nevertheless, QUIC still outperforms even our tuned variant of TCP. This performance advantage is mostly caused by QUIC's reduced RTT design during connection establishment, and, in case of lossy networks due to its ability to circumvent head-of-line blocking.