Enhancing QUIC Performance in Heterogeneous Networks: A Proactive Connection Migration Approach

The Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol provides a secure, reliable, and low‐latency communication foundation for HTTP/3. Connection migration is a key technology of QUIC. When the IP/Port of a connection changes, the connection ID is used to maintain a secure and uninterrupted connection. However, current connection migration is passive, designed to support mobile handover and weak network environments. In this paper, we propose proactive connection migration for QUIC (PCM‐QUIC), which combines connection migration and online path selection, enabling QUIC to select the best quality transmission path while maintaining the connection. First, PCM‐QUIC integrates the exploration of network quality across different paths into multiple user request actions. Then, considering response completion time and jitter, PCM‐QUIC identifies the optimal access path for the current Internet service through online learning. In addition, we propose an upper confidence bound‐based path selection algorithm with the goal of minimizing the confidence upper limit of the path reward. Experimental results show that, compared with the original QUIC, PCM‐QUIC reduces the average response completion time by up to 59.43%.