Today Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) declared plans to officially propose its network protocol Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The firm wishes to make QUIC a UDP based transport protocol designed for the modern Internet, an Internet standard.
In June 2013, Google first showcased QUIC and included it with Chrome Canary. Then still a pilot protocol, QUIC incorporated a plethora of new features. The main intention has remained constant: run a stream multiplexing protocol on top of UDP rather than TCP.
Pending activities
Prior to dispatching QUIC off to the IETF, Google said it has certain housekeeping activities remaining. This includes altering the wire format as well as updating reference implementation from SPDY-over-QUIC to HTTP2-over-QUIC. In February, Google declared its discarding its SPDY protocol for HTTP/2. The latter is the 2nd major version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Presently QUIC takes care of around half of the requests from Chrome to Google servers. Google is still boosting QUIC traffic. It intends to make ultimately the latter the default transport from Google clients (not only Chrome but completely the firm’s mobile apps) to Google servers.
Favorable results
Google has announced QUIC overall performance so far as positive. The firm attributed QUIC’s performance improvement to lower latency connection establishment, enhanced congestion control, as well as superior loss recovery.
Superior efficiency
QUIC is designed such that if a client has previously communicated with a given server, it can start dispatching data without any round trips. This translates to faster page loads. According to Google, 75% of connections can benefit from this zero round trip facility. QUIC also comes with enhanced congestion control and loss recovery.
When retransmitting a packet, packet sequence numbers are never repeated which does away with ambiguity regarding which packets were received. This also eliminates retransmission timeouts.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) claims that Google Search where connections are frequently pre-established experiences a 3% improvement in mean page load time.
