How Quick Is QUIC in Satellite Networks

Quick UDP Internet protocol (QUIC) was proposed by Google in 2012 as a reliable protocol on top of UDP. Compared with the widely used TCP for HTTP protocol, it is a new multiplexed and secure transport optimized for HTTP/2 semantics. The improvements of QUIC in terrestrial networks have been proved by previous researches, but few works have been done yet to evaluate the performance of QUIC via satellite links. In this paper, for the first time we evaluate the performance of QUIC, in comparison with HTTP/2 and HTTPS, via GEO satellite Internet access emulated on a dedicated testbed. The results of the experiments and our analysis confirm that QUIC does help reduce the overall page retrieval time in satellite networks. It is noted that QUIC outperforms HTTPS and HTTP/2 especially when the propagation delays are long and the packet loss rates are high, which is normal for GEO mobile satellite communications.