Performance Evaluation of QUIC vs TCP for Cloud Control Systems

QUIC is a UDP-based transport layer protocol developed by Google that boasts lower latency performance than TCP. However, different conclusions have been reported regarding its performance due to variations in targeted applications and experimental setups. This leads to our conclusion that protocol performance evaluation should be heavily dependent on the QoS requirements of the target application. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate the performance of QUIC in the context of cloud control systems by comparing it with TCP and TCP-based protocols. We performed the evaluation under two different cloud environments: a private edge cluster and public cloud. Meanwhile, different networks were utilized under different evaluation scenarios, including 5G, Ethernet LAN and Internet. Our objective is to determine if QUIC can meet the quality of service requirements of a cloud control system. By focusing on this specific use case, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the potential benefits and limitations of QUIC on cloud control systems. From our evaluation results, we concluded that the performance of different protocols varies based on the characteristics of different control systems. However, QUIC offers more advantages for deploying and enhancing more time-critical systems.