Waiting for QUIC: Passive Measurements to Understand QUIC Deployments

Authors: Jonas Mücke, Marcin Nawrocki, Raphael Hiesgen, Patrick Sattler, Johannes Zirngibl, Georg Carle, Jan Luxemburk, Thomas Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch

Published in Proc. ACM Netw., 2025

Abstract:
QUIC experiences a rapid adoption since its standardization in 2021, and hypergiants configure their infrastruc-ture to optimize for QUIC performance. In this paper, we introduce a passive measurement method to studyboth the progressive rollout and individual hypergiant configurations during the last five years. By analyzingbackscatter traffic of the UCSD network telescope, we are able to make the following observations. First,Meta, Google, and Cloudflare configure significantly different maximal retransmission numbers and timeouts.Second, we can identify different off-net deployments of hypergiants, using packet features, such as QUICconnection IDs, packet coalescence, and packet lengths. Third, we observe changing hypergiant deploymentconfigurations during our different measurement periods. Fourth, connection IDs can allow further insightsinto load balancer deployments, such as the number of servers. We bolster our results using two orthogonalmeasurements: passive recording of QUIC flows and active probing.

Recommended citation: Jonas Mücke, Marcin Nawrocki, Raphael Hiesgen, Patrick Sattler, Johannes Zirngibl, Georg Carle, Jan Luxemburk, Thomas Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch, "Waiting for QUIC: Passive Measurements to Understand QUIC Deployments." Proc. ACM Netw., 2025.