What question did this study set out to answer?

To design and implement a framework for measuring modern Internet transport and application-layer protocols.

February 11, 2026Open Access

Design and Implementation of Novel Transport and Application Layer Measurement Techniques

Key Points

To design and implement a framework for measuring modern Internet transport and application-layer protocols.
Developed QUIC Lab, a modular framework for active measurements.
Included a Domain Extractor for target set construction from domain lists.
Created a probing engine for QUIC- and HTTP/3-based measurements using configurable probes.
Implemented an Analyzer for deriving statistics from qlog traces and recorded outputs.
Executed large-scale scans of 6.24 million domains resulting in 240 million qlog events.
Achieved probing rates of approximately 26 domains per second with low resource utilization.
Found QUIC deployed in 28–32% of examined domains, with HTTP/3 prevalent in connection negotiations.

Abstract

The deployment of new transport and application-layer protocols such as QUIC and HTTP/3 has outpaced existing Internet measurement tooling, which is often tailored to TCP and HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 and lacks support for structured protocol logging. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a modular, extensible framework for Internet-wide active measurements of modern transport and applicationlayer protocols. The framework, termed QUIC Lab, comprises three subsystems: a Domain Extractor that constructs reproducible target sets from large domain lists, a probing engine that orchestrates configurable QUIC- and HTTP/3-based measurements via pluggable probes, and an Analyzer that ingests recorder outputs and qlog (structured QUIC logging) traces to derive aggregated statistics. QUIC Lab is implemented in Rust on top of Tencent’s TQUIC library, with a clear separation between probe-specific logic and shared services such as configuration management, DNS resolution, rate limiting, transport abstraction, recording, and qlog multiplexing. Its scalability and robustness are demonstrated through two large-scale scans of approximately 6.24 M domains derived from Tranco, executed from privately operated servers in Switzerland and an AWS EC2 instance in the US-East region. Across roughly 5.48 M connection attempts per vantage point, the framework produced about 240 M qlog events with sustained probing rates of approximately 26 domains per second, while maintaining low CPU, memory, and network utilization. The empirical results show that QUIC and HTTP/3 are widely, but not universally, deployed among popular domains, with successful QUIC handshakes observed for 28–32% of targets and HTTP/3 dominating the negotiated ALPN values. Server-side QUIC transport parameters exhibit highly consistent distributions across vantage points, indicating convergence on a small set of operational defaults. No evidence of Multipath QUIC deployment was found in the examined population.

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