Abstract—As user applications require always more throughput and less latency, new transport protocols such as Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) are proposed. QUIC is currently deployed by Google and is targeted to replace both Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) for HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) transport. The flexibility of QUIC, which is implemented in user-space, can however, notably influence the fairness in the sharing of network resources. In this work, we are interested in evaluating the behavior of TCP and QUIC when they coexist together in the network with the same Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA), namely CUBIC. We concretely quantify session level fairness between QUIC and TCP on a platform that injects real traffic over emulated network conditions. Results show that a configurable parameter in QUIC stacks: the number of TCP connections emulated by a single QUIC connection has a strong impact on fairness.

Index Terms—QUIC, TCP, Congestion Control, CUBIC, fair- ness.

Cite: Romuald Corbel, Stéphane Tuffin, Annie Gravey, Xavier Marjou and Arnaud Braud, "Assessing the Impact of QUIC on Network Fairness,” vol. 14, no. 10, pp. 908-914, 2019. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.14.10.908-914