The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has been the data transmission protocol of choice for the internet since its infancy, and has existed since all the way back to 1974. Together with the Internet Protocol (IP), the two seminal standards have worked in conjunction to govern how the internet functions across all devices that try to make use of it. TCP is responsible for breaking up data sent from devices into individually-addressed packets that are then shuttled through the internet, before being reassembled into a recognizable form at the other end of the connection. TCP is also responsible for how connections are established, as well as for the recovery of data packets that are lost in transmission.
TCP, however, is also aging. Replacements have been in development for years to try to improve what the internet has been using for data transmission essentially since it began its service decades ago. One of these replacements is Quic, a new data transmission protocol that’s been in development at Google for 8 years now since its announcement back in 2013 as an experimental addition to their Chrome browser.
According to a 2017 research paper on the new protocol published by Google, an in-house version of the protocol cut wait times for search results by around 8% on PCs and around 4% on mobile users. Video buffering wait times on their YouTube platform also dropped by 18% for PC users and around 14% for mobile users.
Recognizing these improvements, Quic was finally published as a new standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international community of network designers, vendors, operators, and researchers which set many standards for the global internet network. Said Jana Iyengar, an engineer who helped lead Quic standardization at internet infrastructure company Fastly, in a blog post: “The internet transport ecosystem has been ossified for decades now. […] Quic is poised to lead the charge on the next generation of internet innovations.”
Quic is designed to improve on the same tasks that TCP is capable of. The new standard also co-opts the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) standard, which is faster than TCP but lacks its ability to recover lost packets. For that reason, Quic employs another data recovery mechanism that’s even faster than TCP. Quic is also faster at setting up encrypted connections—a critical improvement, as both Quic and TCP form the foundation of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that all web browsers on devices use to fetch web pages.
Bibliography
- Iyengar, J. (2021, May 27). QUIC is now RFC 9000. Fastly. Retrieved August 16, 2021, from https://www.fastly.com/blog/quic-is-now-rfc-9000
- Iyengar, J., & Thomson, M. (2021, May 1). RFC 9000 QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport. RFC Editor. Retrieved August 16, 2021, from https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9000.html
- Shankland, S. (2021, May 29). Quic gives the internet’s data transmission foundation a needed speedup. CNET. Retrieved August 16, 2021, from https://www.cnet.com/news/quic-gives-the-internets-data-transmission-foundation-a-needed-speedup/
