The ACK Policy Optimization Algorithm for QUIC
Ekaterina Volodina, Erwin Paul Rathgeb · 2023
In order to achieve new performance gains, network protocols are constantly being improved. One of the important novel developments is the new generation transport protocol QUIC. Although QUIC includes many advanced options, it suffers from performance degradation compared to TCP. One of the reasons is the larger number of acknowledgments (ACK). In practice ACK thinning by middleboxes is widespread for TCP. However, this is not possible for QUIC due to encrypted header and payload. The previous works aimed at solving this issue propose static and dynamic solutions. However, they cannot completely solve this problem, since the static approach cannot fit all network configurations and our previous solution requires a modification of the short QUIC packet header. In this work we propose an ACK optimisation mechanism for QUIC which is able to find the optimum value for delaying acknowledgements, can readapt it to the changing network environments and does not require any modification of the QUIC packet header.