IO-QUIC: making QUIC-based content delivery faster

Abstract

QUIC is a UDP-based transport layer protocol designed to address a number of existing problems with TCP/TLS. One of the popular applications of QUIC is large-file content delivery such as video streaming, so QUIC-based content carriers must promise good throughput to meet their needs. However, for large-file content delivery, QUIC servers consume a significant amount of CPU cycles for mechanical and repetitive disk I/O and network I/O. This has an adverse impact on QUIC content delivery performance. Inspired by a previous work, IO-TCP, this thesis presents IO-QUIC, an architecture that separates the QUIC stack and offloads heavy data plane operations to SmartNIC. Through experiments, we confirm that the IO-QUIC design saves the host CPU cycles of the existing QUIC server, and we explore the ways to achieve extra performance improvements through performance analysis.