The QUIC Fix for Optimal Video Streaming

Abstract

Within a few years of its introduction, QUIC has gained traction: a significant chunk of traffic is now delivered over QUIC. The networking community is actively engaged in debating the fairness, performance, and applicability of QUIC for various use cases, but these debates are centered around a narrow, common theme: how does the new reliable transport built on top of UDP fare in different scenarios? Evaluation of unreliable delivery in QUIC remains largely unexplored.The option for delivering content unreliably, as in a best-effort model, deserves the QUIC designers' and the QUIC community's attention. We propose extending QUIC to support unreliable streams and discuss a simple use case of video streaming---an application that dominates the overall Internet traffic---that can leverage the unreliable streams and potentially bring immense benefits to network operators and content providers. We demonstrate, using controlled-environment trials, how to combine reliable and unreliable streams to outperform TCP and QUIC in video streaming