CDNetworks, an APAC-leading network to deliver edge as a service, announces support for QUIC and HTTP/3. This milestone signifies a huge leap toward enhancing the company’s capabilities in web application performance and improving the efficiency of network transmissions. It will also benefit CDNetworks’ customer base and help enterprises deliver a superior digital experience to their end users.
QUIC is a network protocol developed by Google. With its high transmission efficiency and multiplexed transport capabilities, QUIC was adopted as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and became the underlying transport protocol of the next-generation Internet protocol HTTP/3. It is now widely regarded as a replacement for TCP.
A Significant Milestone Worth Noting
With more than 20 years of content delivery network (CDN) and media delivery experience, CDNetworks is committed to overcoming network transmission barriers. From HTTP/1 to the latest version of HTTP/3, CDNetworks continues to develop cutting-edge technologies that improve network transmission and deliver a rich and immersive user experience. As a testament to this commitment, CDNetworks’ platforms began implementing support for the QUIC protocol five years ago.
- 2018:Â CDNetworks implements support for the QUIC protocol.
- 2019:Â gQUIC is fully supported on all CDNetworks nodes.
- 2020:Â CDNetworks implements support for the latest version of gQUIC.
- Now:Â CDNetworks implements support for all versions of iQUIC and gQUIC, including the QUIC IETF-v1 protocol standard.
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Addressing the significance meaning of CDNetworks’ full-platform support for QUIC, Doyle Deng, Head of Global Marketing and Product of CDNetworks, said, “Before HTTP/3, TCP had been the underlying transmission protocol for HTTP. With the exponential growth of Internet capacity and scale, interactive scenarios are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. This places a tremendous burden on real-time transmissions. For these reasons, it is becoming clear that the inherent performance limitations of traditional TCP can no longer meet current demands.
“In this context, CDNetworks’ full-platform support for QUIC demonstrates our commitment to boost our service capabilities of the Last Mile CDN delivery to consumers. Relying on this underlying protocol (QUIC), CDNetworks can better support a wide range of companies and industries with significantly more powerful service capabilities. Moreover, QUIC is well suited to deliver more friendly experiences to end users of diverse application scenarios, such as live streaming and video-on-demand in media streaming, online gaming, E-Commerce, IOT, and other Internet-based digital scenarios.” Doyle added.
Ready to Embrace the Era of QUIC
To embrace the new era of QUIC, CDNetworks upgraded its platform’s frame processing capacity and optimized its performance to minimize resource consumption. Initial results show that, with the help of CDNetworks’ new platform, QUIC has made a significant impact on media delivery. “In QUIC stream pull scenarios having a 1Mbps bitrate and suffering 20% packet loss conditions, QUIC is 20% smoother than TCP, with the first packet delivered roughly 0.2 to 0.8 seconds faster than TCP. These results prove the transmission efficiency that QUIC offers over TCP.” said Jaechoon Lee, Korea Head of Technical Solution Engineering.
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QUIC can be readily adapted for a variety of use cases that require CDN acceleration, such as real-time applications, IoT, Cloud computing, E-commerce, and financial payment. CDNetworks expects that QUIC will bring significant advancements to media streaming scenarios, whether it be live streaming or video-on-demand. In particular, many of QUIC’s features are ideally suited to address the requirements of live streaming business scenarios. The following are a few key features that QUIC brings to live streaming:
The Key Impacts upon Live Streaming Scenarios
Shortening Video Startup Time
The handshake and connection times to establish a QUIC connection are much faster than TCP. Compared to traditional TCP, the QUIC transport layer uses UDP, which reduces the delay of one 1-RTT in a TCP three-way handshake. This reduced time shortens the delivery time of the first packet as well as the video startup time experienced by end users. This advantage is particularly attractive for latency-sensitive applications and a compelling reason providers of video applications to optimize their offerings with the QUIC protocol.
Improving Live Streaming for Poor Network Environments
QUIC introduces the concept of multiplexing multiple streams on a connection. By designing and implementing independent flow controls for each stream, QUIC solves the head-of-line blocking problem that affects the entire connection. QUIC also supports Forward Error Correction (FEC), which can reduce the number of retransmissions and improve transmission efficiency in areas that suffer from poor network range and reception.
These two features, along with the help of CDNetworks’ new platform, boost the bandwidth performance of typical QUIC stream pull scenarios by 41%, and finally make the live streaming experience significantly better on poor network conditions.
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