2020/04/04 by Darius Saif, Chung–Horng Lung, Chung-Horng Lung +1 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Engineering · #Benchmark (surveying) #Caching and Content Delivery #Computer network #Computer science #Engineering #Hypertext Transfer Protocol #Image and Video Quality Assessment #Implementation #Latency (audio) #Metric (unit) #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Operating system #Protocol (science) #Quality of experience #Quality of service #Software engineering #Telecommunications #The Internet #Throughput #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.1109/icc42927.2021.9500258
arxiv published 2020/04/04 · arxiv updated 2020/10/11 · openalex publication_date 2021/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Google’s QUIC (GQUIC) is an emerging transport protocol designed to reduce HTTP latency. Deployed across its platforms and positioned as an alternative to TCP+TLS, GQUIC is feature rich: offering reliable data transmission and secure communication. It addresses TCP+TLS’s (i) Head of Line Blocking (HoLB), (ii) excessive round-trip times on connection establishment, and (iii) entrenchment. Efforts by the IETF are in progress to standardize the next generation of HTTP’s (HTTP/3, or H3) delivery, with their own variant of QUIC. While perfor-mance benchmarks have been conducted between GQUIC and HTTP/2-over-TCP (H2), few analyses, to our knowledge, have taken place between H2 and H3. In addition, past studies rely on Page Load Time as their main, if not only, metric. The purpose of this article is to benchmark the latest draft specification of H3 and dig into a user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) by using Lighthouse: an open-source (and metric diverse) auditing tool. Our findings show that, for one of H3’s early implementations, H3 is mostly worse but achieves a higher average throughput.