QUIC vs TCP: A Performance Evaluation over LTE with NS-3

In the vast majority of mobile applications, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is still leveraged at the transport layer of the Internet’s protocol stack. But, in many cases, the performance of TCP over mobile networks has been proven sub-optimal in practice, thus causing substantial bottlenecks. Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a new protocol, currently being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that aims at solving some of the inherent problems of TCP. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of QUIC and compare the performance of QUIC and TCP in wireless networks. To compare QUIC with TCP under various transmission scenarios over LTE networks, the ns-3 network simulator has been employed. The simulations performed showed that 1) under good or average transmission conditions, QUIC is characterized by a better steady state throughput at the same time achieving quite lower file download times; and 2) under poor transmission conditions, the two protocols exhibit a similar performance.