Flexible QUIC loss recovery mechanisms for latency-sensitive applications

Since its wide deployment in 2017, the QUIC transport protocol has progressively gained in popularity over the years. The diversity of its transport services makes it suitable to welcome a broader set of applications than traditional transport protocols such as TCP and UDP. Until now, the QUIC protocol only relied on retransmissions to recover from network packet losses. While being efficient in terms of bandwidth, retransmissions need at least one round-trip time to detect lost packets and retransmit them. This added latency to recover from packet losses is undesirable for applications with strong latency requirements. Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) techniques allow providing robust latency guarantees at the cost of reducing the application goodput. This thesis extends the loss recovery mechanism of the QUIC protocol and makes it more general by adopting an application-tailored loss recovery mechanism. Using the techniques developed in this thesis, the QUIC protocol adapts its loss recovery behaviour to the application requirements, selecting the optimal strategy to obtain the best performance for both latency-sensitive and throughput-based applications. We show the benefits and flexibility of our approach over simulated, emulated and real networks using popular network applications with different needs.