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An Experimental Investigation of Tuning QUIC-Based Publish-Subscribe Architectures in IoT

Darius Saif, Ashraf Matrawy

TL;DR

IoT networks suffer from loss and high latency, challenging traditional transport tuning. This study empirically tunes QUIC (via QUIC-GO) for IoT and compares an HTTP/3 based pub-sub (H3) against MQTT-over-QUIC on constrained hardware, under NB-IoT-like emulation. Key contributions include a practical tuning workflow, a MAX_STREAM high-watermark signaling scheme, and a connection-level basicAuth approach, showing H3 delivers lower latency at a modest resource cost. The findings offer concrete guidance for deploying QUIC in IoT, particularly for time-sensitive dissemination where latency is critical. The work also lays groundwork for cross-library validation and broader QoS scenarios in future research.

Abstract

There has been growing interest in using the QUIC transport protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). In lossy and high latency networks, QUIC outperforms TCP and TLS. Since IoT greatly differs from traditional networks in terms of architecture and resources, IoT specific parameter tuning has proven to be of significance. While RFC 9006 offers a guideline for tuning TCP within IoT, we have not found an equivalent for QUIC. This paper is the first of our knowledge to contribute empirically based insights towards tuning QUIC for IoT. We improved our pure HTTP/3 publish-subscribe architecture and rigorously benchmarked it against an alternative: MQTT-over-QUIC. To investigate the impact of transport-layer parameters, we ran both applications on Raspberry Pi Zero hardware. Eight metrics were collected while emulating different network conditions and message payloads. We enumerate the points we experimentally identified (notably, relating to authentication, MAX\_STREAM messages, and timers) and elaborate on how they can be tuned to improve resource consumption and performance. Our application offered lower latency than MQTT-over-QUIC with slightly higher resource consumption, making it preferable for reliable time-sensitive dissemination of information.

An Experimental Investigation of Tuning QUIC-Based Publish-Subscribe Architectures in IoT

TL;DR

IoT networks suffer from loss and high latency, challenging traditional transport tuning. This study empirically tunes QUIC (via QUIC-GO) for IoT and compares an HTTP/3 based pub-sub (H3) against MQTT-over-QUIC on constrained hardware, under NB-IoT-like emulation. Key contributions include a practical tuning workflow, a MAX_STREAM high-watermark signaling scheme, and a connection-level basicAuth approach, showing H3 delivers lower latency at a modest resource cost. The findings offer concrete guidance for deploying QUIC in IoT, particularly for time-sensitive dissemination where latency is critical. The work also lays groundwork for cross-library validation and broader QoS scenarios in future research.

Abstract

There has been growing interest in using the QUIC transport protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). In lossy and high latency networks, QUIC outperforms TCP and TLS. Since IoT greatly differs from traditional networks in terms of architecture and resources, IoT specific parameter tuning has proven to be of significance. While RFC 9006 offers a guideline for tuning TCP within IoT, we have not found an equivalent for QUIC. This paper is the first of our knowledge to contribute empirically based insights towards tuning QUIC for IoT. We improved our pure HTTP/3 publish-subscribe architecture and rigorously benchmarked it against an alternative: MQTT-over-QUIC. To investigate the impact of transport-layer parameters, we ran both applications on Raspberry Pi Zero hardware. Eight metrics were collected while emulating different network conditions and message payloads. We enumerate the points we experimentally identified (notably, relating to authentication, MAX\_STREAM messages, and timers) and elaborate on how they can be tuned to improve resource consumption and performance. Our application offered lower latency than MQTT-over-QUIC with slightly higher resource consumption, making it preferable for reliable time-sensitive dissemination of information.
Paper Structure (22 sections, 20 figures, 7 tables)

This paper contains 22 sections, 20 figures, 7 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Publish-Subscribe Architectures for IoT
  4. MQTT-over-QUIC
  5. HTTP/3-based Publish-Subscribe
  6. Authentication Analysis for H3
  7. QUIC Implementation & IoT Tuning
  8. MAX_STREAM Handling
  9. QUIC Timers
  10. ACK Range Handling
  11. Default Initial RTT
  12. H3 RequestWriter Buffer
  13. Experimental System Setup
  14. Evaluation Approach
  15. Network Modelling
  16. ...and 7 more sections

Figures (20)

  • Figure 1: Emulated Network Topology
  • Figure 2: Time to First Data Frame Comparison (1 Message)
  • Figure 3: Load Scaling - Execution Time
  • Figure 4: Load Scaling - Packets Transmitted
  • Figure 5: Load Scaling - Bytes Transmitted
  • ...and 15 more figures