QUIC: The new protocol of Google for faster internet

Among the many projects, Google find QUIC, a new data-transfer protocol over UDP, which allows minimal latencies with servers that we have already visited.

Who uses Chrome has already been experimenting QUIC, although probably not really ever know. Google has already reported this week that about half of the requests for proprietary services that come from Chrome are now served by the new protocol. QUIC stands for Quick UDP Internet Connection, and its goal is to take the best of the TCP protocol and add it to the faster and more effective UDP.

UDP protocol is often preferred by video games for its low latency, because of the likely loss of packets is not used as often for the loading of web pages. It is much lighter than TCP, especially because it uses less services for the correction of errors. This means that the client and server do not constantly monitor the presence of any lost packets.

It is precisely for this reason that UDP is preferred especially on games where you really need is a low-latency communication and less complex as possible. During an action-focused session of a video game, if you made a certain movement is not received from a server, it is useless to lose tenths of a second or even second to try to send it again; It is more convenient to send a new figure for the next movement.

It is clear that today the UDP protocol is not recommended for the loading of web pages, as the potential loss of the packages may not provide the download of all data. With QUIC, Google wants to correct this problem and to provide the best features of UDP and TCP in a single protocol, and with the most advanced security tools. The image which is shown below explains best the objectives of QUIC.

On a TCP secure (TLS), the browser must perform several steps to ensure that the server can guarantee the right to send data packets. With QUIC, at least as reported by Google, the browser can start to ” talk ” with the server without any latency, as long as the two systems have previously disclosed. QUIC is not the only project that Google has been at stake for optimizing the speed of loading pages.

SPDY is already behind the new standard HTTP / 2, but unlike QUIC still relies on the slower TCP. The latter is usually managed by the operating system, and Google does not have the ability to make major changes: ” QUIC allows us to test and experiment with new ideas, and to get the results right away, ” explains team at the base of the Protocol, which hopes in the integration of its features on TCP and TLS integrated operating systems.

Google claims that QUIC able to speed up the process of loading the page of Google searches of 3%, but it is likely that other sites heavier and less optimized the benefits are greater. Thanks to some of the new features of QUIC as ” congestion control ” and ” loss recover over UDP “, YouTube users may experience a 30% rebuffer less, while additional benefits may be encountered by those who connect with slow connections.

QUIC today is just an experiment built on Chrome, but it could soon become a de facto standard. Moreover, even SPDY was integrated at first in prototype form on Chrome and used on web service’s giant, and was then proposed as the basis of HTTP / 2. Google’s plans are to propose HTTP2-over-QUIC the IETF in the near future, so that it becomes a new Internet standard to make the network much more efficient than today.