QUIC Employment: Comparing the Response Time of Facebook and Twitter

TCP has been the most reliable transport layer protocol, used on the Internet since 1974, thanks to its ordered and error-checked delivery, stateful property and retransmission property. The most relevant drawback is the high latency, meaning a connection that does not require a reliable delivery can use UDP, another transport layer protocol, slimmer than TCP, which provides a connectionless datagram service prioritizing time over reliability. During these years, researchers have worked on new protocols in the attempt of decreasing page load time without sacrificing reliability. Even Google proposed a solution, the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol, born in 2013. Since QUIC is a very recent protocol, this paper could help to further understanding its employment and performance in typical scenarios such as, for instance, when considering major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, with only the former employing QUIC. In particular, we have measured the response time of the two applications when considering different network conditions. Our preliminary results could be used to generate traffic models and, partially, to advocate the use of QUIC.