“Does QUIC make the Web faster?” by Prasenjeet Biswal and Omprakash Gnawali. In Proceedings of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2016), Dec. 2016.
Increase in size and complexity of web pages has challenged the efficiency of HTTP. Recent developments to speed up the web have resulted in two promising protocols, HTTP/2 (RFC 7540) at the application layer and QUIC (multiplexed stream transport over UDP). Google servers are using HTTP/2 and QUIC whereas other major sites like Facebook and Twitter have begun using HTTP/2. In this paper, we compare the performance of HTTP/2 vs QUIC+SPDY 3.1 by studying the Web page load times. In the first set of experiments, we serve synthetic pages (only static objects) over both protocols in emulated controlled network conditions and then extend it to real network, both wired and cellular (2G/3G in India and 3G/4GLTE in US). Further, we conduct experiments on a set of web pages on the most popular sites from the Internet (Alexa Rankings) in controlled conditions. We find QUIC to perform better overall under poor network conditions (low bandwidth, high latency and high loss), for e.g. more than 90% of synthetic pages loaded faster with QUIC in 2G compared to 60% in 4GLTE. This is due to the lower connection establishment latency and improved congestion control mechanism in QUIC. However, QUIC does not offer significant advantage when a webpage consists of many small-sized objects.
BibTeX entry:
@inproceedings{quic-globecom2016,
author = {Prasenjeet Biswal and Omprakash Gnawali},
title = {{Does QUIC make the Web faster?}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Global Communications Conference
(GLOBECOM 2016)},
month = dec,
year = {2016}
}