arXiv subjects

Darius Saif

Publications and source records attributed to Darius Saif.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Demystifying QUIC from the Specifications

QUIC is an advanced transport layer protocol whose ubiquity on the Internet is now very apparent. Importantly, QUIC fuels the next generation of web browsing: HTTP/3. QUIC is a stateful and connection oriented protocol which offers similar features (and more) to the combination of TCP and TLS. There are several difficulties which readers may encounter when learning about QUIC: i.) its rapid evolution (particularly, differentiation between the QUIC standard and the now deprecated Google QUIC), ii.) numerous RFCs whose organization, language, and detail may be challenging to the casual reader, and iii.) the nature of QUIC's cross-layer and privacy-centric implementation, making it impossible to understand or debug by looking at packets alone. For these reasons, the aim of this paper is to present QUIC in a complete yet approachable fashion, thereby demystifying the protocol from its specifications.

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arXiv2025

A Datagram Extension to DNS over QUIC: Proven Resource Conservation in the Internet of Things

In this paper, we investigate the Domain Name System (DNS) over QUIC (DoQ) and propose a non-disruptive extension, which can greatly reduce DoQ's resource consumption. This extension can benefit all DNS clients - especially Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This is important because even resource-constrained IoT devices can generate dozens of DNS requests every hour. DNS is a crucial service that correlates IP addresses and domain names. It is traditionally sent as plain-text, favoring low-latency results over security and privacy. The repercussion of this can be eavesdropping and information leakage about IoT devices. To address these concerns, the newest and most promising solution is DoQ. QUIC offers features similar to TCP and TLS while also supporting early data delivery and stream multiplexing. DoQ's specification requires that DNS exchanges occur over independent streams in a long-lived QUIC connection. Our hypothesis is that due to DNS's typically high transaction volume, managing QUIC streams may be overly resource intensive for IoT devices. Therefore, we have designed and implemented a data delivery mode for DoQ using QUIC datagrams, which we believe to be more preferable than stream-based delivery. To test our theory, we analyzed the memory, CPU, signaling, power, and time of each DoQ delivery mode in a setup generating real queries and network traffic. Our novel datagram-based delivery mode proved to be decisively more resource-friendly with little compromise in terms of functionality or performance. Furthermore, our paper is the first to investigate multiple queries over DoQ, to our knowledge.

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arXiv2022

An Experimental Investigation of Tuning QUIC-Based Publish-Subscribe Architectures in IoT

There has been growing interest in using the QUIC transport protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). In lossy and high latency networks, QUIC outperforms TCP and TLS. Since IoT greatly differs from traditional networks in terms of architecture and resources, IoT specific parameter tuning has proven to be of significance. While RFC 9006 offers a guideline for tuning TCP within IoT, we have not found an equivalent for QUIC. This paper is the first of our knowledge to contribute empirically based insights towards tuning QUIC for IoT. We improved our pure HTTP/3 publish-subscribe architecture and rigorously benchmarked it against an alternative: MQTT-over-QUIC. To investigate the impact of transport-layer parameters, we ran both applications on Raspberry Pi Zero hardware. Eight metrics were collected while emulating different network conditions and message payloads. We enumerate the points we experimentally identified (notably, relating to authentication, MAX\_STREAM messages, and timers) and elaborate on how they can be tuned to improve resource consumption and performance. Our application offered lower latency than MQTT-over-QUIC with slightly higher resource consumption, making it preferable for reliable time-sensitive dissemination of information.

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arXiv2021

A Pure HTTP/3 Alternative to MQTT-over-QUIC in Resource-Constrained IoT

In this paper, we address the issue of scalable, interoperable, and timely dissemination of information in resource-constrained IoT. Scalability is addressed by adopting a publish-subscribe architecture. To address interoperable and timely dissemination, we propose an HTTP/3 (H3) solution that exploits the wide-ranging improvements made over H2. We evaluated our solution by comparing it to a state-of-the-art work: MQTT-over-QUIC. Because QUIC and H3 have undergone standardization in tandem, we hypothesized that H3 would take better advantage of QUIC transport than an MQTT mapping would. Performance, network overhead, and device overhead were investigated for both protocols. Our H3-based solution satisfied our timely dissemination requirement by offering a key performance savings of 1 RoundTrip Time (RTT) for publish messages to arrive at the broker. In IoT networks, with typically high RTT, this savings is significant. On the other hand, we found that MQTT-over-QUIC put marginally less strain over the network.

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arXiv2020

An Early Benchmark of Quality of Experience Between HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 using Lighthouse

Google's QUIC (GQUIC) is an emerging transport protocol designed to reduce HTTP latency. Deployed across its platforms and positioned as an alternative to TCP+TLS, GQUIC is feature rich: offering reliable data transmission and secure communication. It addresses TCP+TLS's (i) Head of Line Blocking (HoLB), (ii) excessive round-trip times on connection establishment, and (iii) entrenchment. Efforts by the IETF are in progress to standardize the next generation of HTTP's (HTTP/3, or H3) delivery, with their own variant of QUIC. While performance benchmarks have been conducted between GQUIC and HTTP/2-over-TCP (H2), no such analysis to our knowledge has taken place between H2 and H3. In addition, past studies rely on Page Load Time as their main, if not only, metric. The purpose of this work is to benchmark the latest draft specification of H3 and dig further into a user's Quality of Experience (QoE) using Lighthouse: an open source (and metric diverse) auditing tool. Our findings show that, for one of H3's early implementations, H3 is mostly worse but achieves a higher average throughput

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