An experimental protocol developed by Google to speed up latency-sensitive applications such as Web search. A prime goal is that connections can be established more quickly than with TCP ("zero RTT connection establishment"). The protocol is layered on top of UDP for deployability. According to a Chromium Blog article from April 2015, "roughly half of all requests from Chrome to Google servers are served over QUIC".
The IETF QUIC Working Group was chartered in October 2016, with the following goals stated in its original charter:
- Minimizing connection establishment and overall transport latency or applications, starting with HTTP/2;
- Providing multiplexing without head-of-line blocking;
- Requiring only changes to path endpoints to enable deployment;
- Enabling multipath and forward error correction extensions; and
- Providing always-secure transport, using TLS 1.3 by default.
References
- Experimenting with QUIC, Chromium Blog, 27 June 2013
- A QUIC Update on Google's Experimental Transport, Chromium Blog, 17 April 2015
- Google Wants To Speed Up The Web With Its QUIC Protocol, Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch, 19 April 2015
- QUIC Design Document and Specification Rationale
- QUIC FAQ for Geeks
- draft-ietf-quic-transport-13, QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport, Jana Iyengar, Martin Thomson, June 2018
- draft-ietf-quic-http-13, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over QUIC, Mike Bishop, June 2018
- draft-ietf-quic-qpack-01, QPACK: Header Compression for HTTP over QUIC, Charles 'Buck' Krasic, Mike Bishop, Alan Frindell, June 2018
- draft-pardue-quic-http-unbound-server-push-01, Unbound Server Push (USP) for HTTP/QUIC, Lucas Pardue, July 2018
- draft-ietf-quic-recovery-13, QUIC Loss Detection and Congestion Control, Jana Iyengar, Ian Swett, June 2018
- draft-ietf-quic-tls-13, Using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to Secure QUIC, Martin Thomson, Sean Turner, June 2018
- draft-duke-quic-load-balancers-01, QUIC-LB: Using Load Balancers to Generate QUIC Connection IDs, Martin Duke, May 2018
- draft-ietf-quic-applicability-02, Applicability of the QUIC Transport Protocol, Mirja Kuehlewind, Brian Trammell, July 2018
- draft-ietf-quic-manageability-02, Manageability of the QUIC Transport Protocol, Mirja Kuehlewind, Brian Trammell, July 2018
- draft-stephan-quic-interdomain-troubleshooting-01, QUIC Interdomain Troubleshooting, Emile Stephan, Mathilde Cayla, Arnaud Braud, Fred Fieau, Alex Ferrieux, Marcus Ihlar, July 2018
– SimonLeinen - 2017-09-27