The Quic and the Dead – Mobile Experience Improvement

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THE QUIC AND THE DEAD
BY RAGHU VENKAT
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With a mobile-first world, delivering a fast and
rich mobile experience is critical. Two ways to
improve the mobile experience are
application-level optimizations and network-level
optimizations. The best approach is to do both
optimize the content and structure of an
application and the network transport. With
Instart Logic's software-defined application
delivery platform, we have innovative performance
features such as streaming, adaptation,
and interception, which provide application-level
optimizations to accelerate mobile app
delivery. A number of mobile application
delivery companies are only doing network-level
optimizations with proprietary protocols over
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) that seemingly help
to solve the performance challenges in the
wireless last mile. Just focusing on
network-level optimizations with a proprietary
protocol is a half-baked solution that will
eventually fade into obscurity once a standard
protocol that utilizes UDP is released. Instart
Logic has always preferred something more open
that may eventually become a standard. We saw
Google take the lead on a successor to HTTP/1.1
and do this in a very open way. The ecosystem
quickly adopted SPDY and then has embraced most
of SPDY in HTTP/2. Like others, we implemented
SPDY as soon as it was an open protocol and will
be supporting HTTP/2 shortly.  Googles
experimental protocol, QUIC, which leverages UDP,
shows promising results in its attempt to solve
the latency problem inherent in the wireless last
mile. Network protocol optimizations are an area
ripe for disruption and the emergence of HTTP/2
has been a big leap forward. While HTTP/2 is
attempting to solve many of the latency problems
by multiplexing, compressing headers, server
push, etc., it is still running on top of the
legacy TCP standard. TCP is a robust protocol
that has been around for decades, but it has
several shortcomings specifically related to
latency and congestion three-way handshakes and
head-of-line blocking. For congested lossy
wireless networks, more needs to be done. One
option is to switch from TCP to UDP since UDP is
a simple, connectionless protocol that requires
no handshakes. However, UDP also has its
limitations.
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QUIC, short for Quick UDP Internet Connection, is
designed to overcome the limitations of UDP by
implementing several features needed for HTTP/2
in the application layer on top of UDP. The
design goal of QUIC is to replace HTTP over TCP
as the default protocol for web content delivered
to end users. Among other features, QUIC is
designed to have no round trip requests as
compared to 1 to 3 requests for TCPTLS. The
first time a QUIC client connects to a server,
the client must perform a one round trip
handshake to setup the secure connection, but
thereafter, the credentials are cached so future
round trips are not required. Furthermore, QUIC
solves the issue of head of line blocking that is
inherent in the TCP protocol (HTTP/2 is also
attempting to fix head of line blocking). QUIC
can deliver all the received packets to the
application without waiting for retransmission.
Ultimately, QUIC seeks to provide a real-time
performance improvement over TCP with lower
latency connections, improved congestion control,
and better loss recovery. In early
experiments, Google has already seen QUIC
outshine TCP by shaving a full second off the
Google Search page load times for the slowest 1
percent of connections. YouTube has also seen a
remarkable improvement with 30 percent fewer
re-buffers when watching videos over QUIC. If it
does materialize into a standard, implementation
of QUIC could provide a much-needed performance
boost for both web and mobile applications.
Today, roughly half of all requests served over
Chrome are using the QUIC protocol, and it will
eventually be the default transport protocol for
Google Chrome, accessing both mobile apps and
properties. It is only a matter of time before
QUIC is available as an iOS and Android SDK and
as the default protocol for mobile applications.
As the implementation inefficiencies of the QUIC
protocol improve, in theory this should provide a
substantial boost to the high-latency, lossy
wireless last-mile networks where roundtrip
matters. With QUIC the likely standard protocol
for mobile applications, companies that are
betting on short-term proprietary protocols will
be a distant memory.
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