INGI Seminar - ReACKed QUICer: Measuring the Performance of Instant Acknowledgments in QUIC Handshakes

by Jonas Muecke, PhD student and research associate at the Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems at TU Dresden

In this short paper, we present a detailed performance analysis of QUIC instant ACK, a standard-compliant approach to reduce waiting times during the QUIC connection setup in common CDN deployments. To understand the root causes of the performance properties, we combine numerical analysis and the emulation of five QUIC implementations using the QUIC Interop Runner. Our experiments comprehensively cover packet loss and non-loss scenarios, different round trip times, and TLS certificate sizes. To clarify instant ACK deployments in the wild, we conduct active measurements of 1M popular domain names. For almost all domain names under control of Cloudflare, Cloudflare uses instant ACK, which in fact improves performance. We also find, however, that instant ACK may lead to unnecessary retransmissions or longer waiting times under some network conditions, raising awareness of drawbacks of instant ACK in the future.

Jonas Muecke is a PhD student and research associate at the Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems at TU Dresden, supervised by Prof. Dr. Matthias Wählisch. Before joining TU Dresden, He graduated with a BSc and MSc in Computer Science from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on active and passive measurements to better understand complex Web infrastructures. He is particularly interested in additional insights gained from the emerging transport protocol QUIC.

Pay attention : Sandwiches will be provided, please fill in the form before day D at 09:00 to reserve a sandwich