Waiting for QUIC: Passive Measurements to Understand QUIC Deployments

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Jonas Mücke - , Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems (Author)
  • Marcin Nawrocki - , NetScout Systems, Inc (Author)
  • Raphael Hiesgen - , Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Author)
  • Patrick Sattler - , Technical University of Munich (Author)
  • Johannes Zirngibl - , Technical University of Munich (Author)
  • Georg Carle - , Technical University of Munich (Author)
  • Jan Luxemburk - , Czech Technical University in Prague, CESNET (Author)
  • Thomas C. Schmidt - , Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Author)
  • Matthias Wählisch - , Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems (Author)

Abstract

QUIC experiences a rapid adoption since its standardization in 2021, and hypergiants configure their infrastructure to optimize for QUIC performance. In this paper, we introduce a passive measurement method to study both the progressive rollout and individual hypergiant configurations during the last five years. By analyzing backscatter traffic of the UCSD network telescope, we are able to make the following observations. First, Meta, Google, and Cloudflare configure significantly different maximal retransmission numbers and timeouts. Second, we can identify different off-net deployments of hypergiants, using packet features, such as QUIC connection IDs, packet coalescence, and packet lengths. Third, we observe changing hypergiant deployment configurations during our different measurement periods. Fourth, connection IDs can allow further insights into load balancer deployments, such as the number of servers. We bolster our results using two orthogonal measurements: passive recording of QUIC flows and active probing.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number41
Pages (from-to)1-26
Number of pages26
JournalProceedings of the ACM on Networking
Volume3
Issue numberCONEXT4
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

TitleACM 21th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
Abbreviated titleCoNEXT 2025
Conference number21
Duration1 - 4 December 2025
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
LocationThe Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
CityHong Kong
CountryHong Kong

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-3825-2807/work/196056598
Mendeley ee98f970-366b-313c-bcca-6695d161ec87

Keywords

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