Performance of QUIC Implementations Over Geostationary Satellite Links

Abstract: QUIC was recently standardized as RFC 9000, but the performance of QUIC over geostationary satellite links is problematic due to the non-applicability of Performance Enhancing Proxies. As of today, there are more than a dozen of different QUIC implementations. So far performance evaluations of QUIC over satellite links were limited to specific QUIC implementations. By deploying a modified version of the IETF QUIC-Interop-Runner, this paper evaluates the performance of multiple QUIC implementations over multiple geostationary satellite links. This includes two emulated ones (with and without packet loss) and two real ones. The results show that the goodput achieved with QUIC over geostationary satellite links is very poor in general, and especially poor when there is packet loss. Some implementations fail completely and the performance of the other implementations varies greatly. The performance depends on both client and server implementation.