MCQUIC: Multicast and unicast in a single transport protocol

TL;DR

MCQUIC extends the QUIC protocol to support multicast communications, enabling efficient one-to-many data transfer with built-in security, and demonstrates its performance and practicality in real network scenarios.

Contribution

This work introduces MCQUIC, a novel multicast extension to QUIC, combining unicast and multicast in a single protocol with security features.

Findings

MCQUIC achieves efficient multicast performance in benchmarks.

MCQUIC successfully operates in emulated and real network environments.

The protocol provides seamless fallback from multicast to unicast.

Abstract

Multicast enables efficient one-to-many communications. Several applications benefit from its scalability properties, e.g., live-streaming and large-scale software updates. Historically, multicast applications have used specialized transport protocols. The flexibility of the recently standardized QUIC protocol opens the possibility of providing both unicast and multicast services to applications with a single transport protocol. We present MCQUIC, an extended version of the QUIC protocol that supports multicast communications. We show how QUIC features and built-in security can be leveraged for multicast transport. We present the design of MCQUIC and implement it in Cloudflare quiche. We assess its performance through benchmarks and in emulated networks under realistic scenarios. We also demonstrate MCQUIC in a campus network. By coupling QUIC with our multicast extension, applications can rely on multicast for efficiency with the possibility to fall back on unicast in case of incompatible network conditions.