# A QUIC Implementation for ns-3

## TL;DR

This paper presents a native ns-3 implementation of the QUIC protocol, enabling researchers to simulate and analyze its performance and design choices in a controlled environment.

## Contribution

It provides the first detailed implementation of QUIC in ns-3, including features, assumptions, and example scenarios, facilitating further research.

## Key findings

- Implementation enables performance testing of QUIC in ns-3
- Highlights differences between implementation and IETF drafts
- Provides example scenarios for protocol evaluation

## Abstract

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a recently proposed transport protocol, currently being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It aims at overcoming some of the shortcomings of TCP, while maintaining the logic related to flow and congestion control, retransmissions and acknowledgments. It supports multiplexing of multiple application layer streams in the same connection, a more refined selective acknowledgment scheme, and low-latency connection establishment. It also integrates cryptographic functionalities in the protocol design. Moreover, QUIC is deployed at the application layer, and encapsulates its packets in UDP datagrams. Given the widespread interest in the new QUIC features, we believe that it is important to provide to the networking community an implementation in a controllable and isolated environment, i.e., a network simulator such as ns-3, in which it is possible to test QUIC's performance and understand design choices and possible limitations. Therefore, in this paper we present a native implementation of QUIC for ns-3, describing the features we implemented, the main assumptions and differences with respect to the QUIC Internet Drafts, and a set of examples.