Performance Benchmarking of the QUIC Transport Protocol

QUIC is a transport protocol that was proposed by Google and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The protocol is gaining popularity, and there seems to be an urge to use it in several use cases and applications. However, while some research efforts have demonstrated performance improvements by switching to QUIC, others have shown performance degradation. In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation of QUIC under different network and workload conditions, both in a controlled environment and in the wild. Our results highlight the conditions in which QUIC excels and when it underperforms and provide a foundation for an educated choice of the transport protocol based on the constraints and needs of a specific use case.