Not so QUIC

Despite known QoE shortcomings, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) has been tied with TCP for many years now. The advent of HTTP/2 powered by transport protocols such as QUIC provides an excellent opportunity to revisit adaptive bitrate streaming with respect to QoE. QUIC promises improved congestion control, zero-RTT connection establishment and multiplexing logical streams. In this work, we adapt state-of-the-art DASH players with buffer-based and hybrid (rate/buffer-based) quality adaptation logic to use QUIC. Our main focus lies in contrasting the QoE performance of DASH algorithms running on top of QUIC versus TCP in various environments. Interestingly, we find through testbed and Internet measurements that QUIC does not provide a boost to current DASH algorithms but instead a degradation in the chosen quality bitrates.