QUIC and Satellite Open Stakeholder Meeting 1400-1530UTC

The purpose of this meeting is to provide a short update on the latest standards status of the new IETF QUIC transport protocol and its implications on design and operation of SATCOM systems. After a brief overview of various work in progress, there will be a discussion of what needs to happen next.

QUIC is the next generation of web protocol, and includes HTTP/3. Already a significant proportion of network traffic, QUIC usage is set to significantly increase as the IETF publishes the specifications as an RFC in early 2021. QUIC is a new connection-oriented protocol being specified by the IETF. It provides an extensible transport improving performance for web and other traffic, and adding support for connection migration. Importantly, QUIC - in contrast to TCP - encrypts and authenticates all header fields, providing enhanced privacy and security. This design prevents existing methods to enhance satellite network performance - such as unauthenticated PEPs, compression, DPI for QoS, and other cross-layer enhancements.

Initial designs of QUIC have focussed on the significant benefits in common deployment scenarios for web traffic. The QUIC and Satellite Open Stakeholder Meeting will examine performance when using an internet path that includes a satellite communication (SATCOM) network.

As the first IETF specifications are published, there is a unique opportunity to influence the design and deployment of this new protocol. QUIC also provides opportunities to influence the emerging specifications and promote extensions, which if widely supported, could offer significant benefit to satellite services. People attending the meeting are invited to join an open discussion of what is now needed by the satellite communications sector, what additional requirements are important, how people can collaborate on research, how people can bring work to the IETF, and finally what steps might be taken to increase stakeholder engagement in the next steps from the satellite communications sector.

This is an open meeting organised by the ESA MTAILS project (https://artes.esa.int/projects/mtails). All participants do have to register on-line before they can join the meeting.

Programme

• Welcome & Start - 5 minutes - Gorry Fairhurst, University of Aberdeen
• Status of QUIC (Total 20 mins) Gorry Fairhurst
  • Overview of Standards, and operation of QUIC (15 mins)
  • Q+A (5 mins)
• Overview of QUIC Satellite Performance (Total 20 mins)
  • QUIC Performance (8 mins) Lorena Albiol Schnitger, Indra
  • QUIC SATCOM Operations (8 mins) Chi-Jiun Su, HNS
  • Q+A (4 mins)
• Overview QUIC satellite-activities (Total 30 mins)
  • ACK Reduction (8 mins) Ana Custura, University of Aberdeen
  • QUIC and Next Gen SATCOM (8 mins) Joerg Deutschmann
  • Accelerating Start-up (8 mins) Nicholas Kuhn, CNES
  • Q+A (6 mins)
• Open discussion on challenges and opportunities (20 mins)
  

Note Well

This meeting is expected to coordinate contributions that may be made to the Internet Engineering Research Task Force. The IRTF note-well will therefore apply to contributions at this meeting, see https://irtf.org/policies/irtf-note-well-2019-11.pdf.