Implementation and Performance Evaluation of TCP over QUIC Tunnels

Abstract

QUIC, a UDP-based transport protocol, addresses several limitations of TCP by offering built-in encryption, stream multiplexing, and improved loss recovery. To extend these benefits to legacy TCP-based applications, this paper explores the implementation and evaluation of a TCP over QUIC tunneling approach. A lightweight, stream-based tunnel is constructed using the Rust-based Quinn library, enabling TCP traffic to traverse QUIC connections transparently. Performance is evaluated under varying network conditions, including packet loss, high latency, and out-of-order delivery. Results indicate that TCP over QUIC maintains significantly higher throughput than native TCP in lossy or unstable environments, with up to a high improvement under 20\% packet loss. However, under ideal network conditions, tunneling introduces modest overhead due to encryption and user-space processing. These findings provide insights into the trade-offs of TCP over QUIC tunneling and its suitability for deployment in dynamic or impaired networks.