MCQUIC - A Multicast Extension for QUIC

TL;DR

This paper introduces MCQUIC, a multicast extension for the QUIC protocol, enhancing scalability for live content delivery with security, privacy, and fallback features, while remaining transparent to applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel multicast extension to QUIC that addresses security and privacy issues, enabling scalable live content delivery with seamless fallback to unicast.

Findings

Supports encryption and integrity verification over multicast

Enables automatic fallback to unicast for compatibility

Easily integrated by enabling an option in QUIC

Abstract

Mass live content, such as world cups, the Superbowl or the Olympics, attract audiences of hundreds of millions of viewers. While such events were predominantly consumed on TV, more and more viewers follow big events on the Internet, which poses a scalability challenge: current unicast delivery over the web comes with large overheads and is inefficient. An attractive alternative are multicast-based transmissions, however, current solutions have several drawbacks, mostly related to security and privacy, which prevent them from being implemented in browsers. In this paper we introduce a multicast extension to QUIC, a widely popular transport protocol standardized by the IETF, that solves several of these problems. It enables multicast delivery by offering encryption as well as integrity verification of packets distributed over multicast and automatic unicast fallback, which solves one of multicasts major obstacles to large scale deployment. It is transparent to applications and can be easily utilized by simply enabling an option in QUIC. This extension is soley focused on the transport layer and uses already existing multicast mechanisms on the network layer.