Content delivery network provider CDNetworks, a company delivering edge as a service in the APAC region, has announced full-platform support for QUIC and HTTP/3, which would make live streaming smoother and more accessible than ever. With faster response times and better accessibility, QUIC would be set to take CDNetworks’ live streaming capabilities to the next level.
CDNetworks claims this milestone to be a significant leap towards enhancing the company’s capabilities in web application performance and improving the efficiency of network transmissions. It would also benefit CDNetworks’ customer base and help enterprises deliver a great digital experience to their end-users.
QUIC is a network protocol developed by Google that is widely considered a replacement for TCP. It has high transmission efficiency and multiplexed transport capabilities. After it was adopted as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), it became the underlying transport protocol of the next-generation Internet protocol HTTP/3.
As a CDN provider, CDNetworks has more than 20 years of experience in content delivery network and media delivery. It has been committed to overcoming network transmission barriers and has been developing cutting-edge technologies to improve network transmission and deliver a rich and immersive user experience.
As a testament to this commitment, CDNetworks’ platforms began implementing support for the QUIC protocol five years ago. In 2018, CDNetworks implemented support for the QUIC protocol. In 2019, gQUIC was fully supported on all CDNetworks nodes. In 2020, CDNetworks implemented support for the latest version of gQUIC. And now, CDNetworks implements support for all versions of iQUIC and gQUIC, including the QUIC IETF-v1 protocol standard.
Doyle Deng, Head of Global Marketing and Product of CDNetworks, said, “Before HTTP/3, TCP had been the underlying transmission protocol for HTTP. With the exponential growth of Internet capacity and scale, interactive scenarios are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. This places a tremendous burden on real-time transmissions. For these reasons, it is becoming clear that the inherent performance limitations of traditional TCP can no longer meet current demands. In this context, CDNetworks’ full-platform support for QUIC demonstrates our commitment to boost our service capabilities of the Last Mile CDN delivery to consumers. Relying on this underlying protocol (QUIC), CDNetworks can better support a wide range of companies and industries with significantly more powerful service capabilities. Moreover, QUIC is well suited to deliver more friendly experiences to end-users of diverse application scenarios, such as live streaming and video-on-demand in media streaming, online gaming, E-Commerce, IOT, and other Internet-based digital scenarios.”
Transmission Efficiency that QUIC Offers over TCP
To transition to the new era of QUIC, CDNetworks increased the platform’s frame processing capability and improved its efficiency to reduce resource usage. Initial findings demonstrate that QUIC has significantly impacted media distribution with the aid of CDNetworks’ new platform.“In QUIC stream pull scenarios having a 1Mbps bitrate and suffering 20% packet loss conditions, QUIC is 20 percent smoother than TCP, with the first packet delivered roughly 0.2 to 0.8 seconds faster than TCP,” said Jaechoon Lee, Korea Head of Technical Solution Engineering at CDNetworks. “These results prove the transmission efficiency that QUIC offers over TCP.”
For a variety of use cases that call for CDN speeding, such as real-time apps, IoT, Cloud computing, E-commerce, and financial payments, QUIC would be easily adaptable. Whether it be live streaming or video-on-demand, CDNetworks anticipates QUIC will significantly progress media streaming situations. Many of QUIC’s characteristics, in particular, are perfectly adapted to handle the needs of live broadcasting commercial situations, according to CDNetworks. QUIC would add the following key attributes to live streaming:
- Video Startup Time Reduction - A QUIC link can be established quicker than TCP through a preamble and communication. The QUIC transmission layer employs UDP instead of conventional TCP, which lessens the latency of one 1-RTT in a TCP three-way exchange. The first packet’s transmission time and the end user’s wait for the video to commence are both decreased by this shorter period of time. This benefit is especially alluring for latency-sensitive applications, and it can represent a strong argument for QUIC protocol optimization on the side of video application vendors.
- Enhancing Live Streaming for Bad Network Conditions - The idea of combining several feeds on a link is introduced by QUIC. The head-of-line stalling issue that impacts the complete link is resolved by QUIC by creating and applying separate flow limits for each stream. In regions with bad network range and coverage, QUIC also enables Forward Error Correction (FEC), which can lower the number of retransmissions and increase transfer effectiveness.
Several Tier 1 businesses in the media and entertainment, ecommerce, online gaming, IOT, and other sectors have received QUIC services from CDNetworks to date. The QUIC protocol, which has been accelerated by CDNetworks with the help of media companies, would ensure high-definition and a seamless watching experience even with large numbers of continuous watchers and traffic surges.
