Beyond QUIC v1: A First Look at Recent Transport Layer IETF Standardization Efforts

TL;DR

This paper examines recent IETF standardization efforts beyond QUIC v1, highlighting new protocols and extensions aimed at improving transport layer performance and address ossification issues.

Contribution

It provides an initial analysis of emerging transport protocols and extensions beyond QUIC v1, focusing on their approaches and potential impact.

Findings

Multiple extensions improve QUIC's capabilities

MASQUE and WebTransport offer alternative solutions

These efforts aim to address transport ossification challenges

Abstract

The transport layer is ossified. With most of the research and deployment efforts in the past decade focussing on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and its extensions, the QUIC standardization by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is to be finalized in early 2021. In addition to addressing the most urgent issues of TCP, QUIC ensures its future extendibility and is destined to drastically change the transport protocol landscape. In this work, we present a first look at emerging protocols and their IETF standardization efforts beyond QUIC v1. While multiple proposed extensions improve on QUIC itself, Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption (MASQUE) as well as WebTransport present different approaches to address long-standing problems, and their interplay extends on QUIC's take to address transport layer ossification challenges.