Add deadline awareness to QUIC

[Chuan Ma <[e-mail]>]

Dear all:

I'm Chuan Ma from Tsinghua University. I want to discuss the deadline
awareness of the current application and whether we should add it to the
QUIC protocol.

Applications may have specific deadline requirements for data transmission.
For instance, a video conference application may require sending the data
with a deadline of 200ms to enable live interaction. The application may
drop the data that misses the deadline, even if the data has already
reached the other end. In this case, it is possible to drop the data after
the given deadline from the sender to save bandwidth and decrease queuing
time. Deadline requirement is also helpful to offer deadline-aware
scheduling combined with QUIC stream priority. Such scheduling methods can
increase the punctuality of QUIC and allow more data to arrive on time. It
is possible to extend QUIC and offer deadline-aware transport as a service.

Nowadays, deadline-aware data transmission is getting more and more
popular. Applications that emphasize real-time interaction, such as VR/AR,
gaming, and video conference, are drawing more and more attention. So
deadline-aware transport has a lot of use cases. However, currently, it is
the application that is responsible for realizing deadline-aware transport.
This transport service should be offered by the transport protocol but not
be left to the application. It is reasonable to provide such transport
service in a new transport protocol, and QUIC is a good base.

We wrote a draft to show this idea in
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-shi-quic-dtp/ and implemented a
protocol based on QUIC called DTP (Deadline-aware Transport Protocol) in
https://github.com/STAR-Tsinghua/DTP.git. We also built a live stream
prototype application to compare the performance between DTP and QUIC (
https://github.com/STAR-Tsinghua/LiveEvaluationSystem.git) We found that
DTP outperformed QUIC in improving data transmission punctuality and saving
bandwidth resources. We published the paper in ICNP22 and built several
systems like proxy and tunnel based on DTP. It would be a good idea to give
this method a try.

We'd like to know what you think about this topic. Please let us know if
you have any comments.

Best regards.

Chuan Ma