QUIC vs. Web Transport vs. Media Over QUIC
With emerging and still-developing streaming technologies and protocols like Media over QUIC (MoQ) and web transport, some basic definitions are in order to differentiate them from one another and to ensure that they aren’t used interchangeably. Akamai’s Will Law, an expert on all things QUIC, provides a cogent and crucial breakdown of QUIC and associated terminology in this discussion with Help Me Stream Research Foundation’s Timothy Fore-Siglin from the latest Streaming Media Connect.
Media over QUIC as an Umbrella Term
To kick-start the conversation, Help Me Stream Research Foundation Founder Timothy Fore-Siglin asks Akamai Chief Architect, Cloud Technology Group, Will Law to answer the question, “What’s the difference between web transport and QUIC or Media over QUIC transport?”
Law states that web transport—which is client- and server-based, not P2P-based—uses QUIC to establish a pipe between a client and a server. The client establishes a session, and it negotiates the session with the server, he says. “Media over QUIC is an umbrella term. Media over QUIC includes an actual protocol, which is called Media over QUIC Transport, [or] MoQT. This is what is being standardized by the IETF,” Law explains. “All the work is public, and I encourage every one of the audience to go there and look. There’s a whole lot of issues that we work through. All the minutes are public. We even have YouTube videos up so you can be involved in the nuts and bolts of the development of Media over QUIC Transport. It’s a very active development space right now.”
Raw QUIC, aka QUIC Minus the HTTP Layer
Law continues, “So Media over QUIC Transport can leverage web transport or … can use what we call raw QUIC. In other words, QUIC without this HTTP layer for establishment. And MoQ Transport is a pub/sub protocol: publish-subscribe. So it’s not a request mechanism like we’re used to with HTTP, where you ask for a resource and you receive it. With a pub/sub system, you ask to receive what we call tracks, which are linear flows of data, and a subscriber subscribers to a track and a publisher sends that track to all the subscribers,”
But, he adds, it’s important to note that Media over QUIC Transport is “not actually defined in terms of media. If you go to the MoQ Transport spec, we are very careful not to bind it to media delivery even though it’s in the name.”
Raw QUIC vs. Web Transport as the Interface
Fore-Siglin asks the follow-up question, “So we’ve got the Media over QUIC Transport and we’ve got web transport and we have raw QUIC. What would be … scenarios where you would use raw QUIC versus what is envisioned with the MoQ Transport?”
Law clarifies that raw QUIC isn’t an alternative to Media over QUIC Transport: “MoQ Transport is this pub/sub protocol. Underneath it, it can use web transport or raw QUIC between the endpoints.” A scenario in which you’d want MoQT to use web transport would be a content delivery network (CDN), “[b]ecause with web transport, you inherit TLS and all the security that comes with domain names and DNS and discovery. That works at scale, we build an economy on it, and we want to leverage it. However, if you’re someone like a video conferencing vendor and you own all the endpoints—the publishing, the relays, and the subscribers—you don’t need that HTTP overhead that comes with web transport; you can leverage QUIC directly,” Law says. He sums up his point as follows: You want to use QUIC when you control the vertical ecosystem, and you want to use web transport when you have a CDN that interrupts among many different clients.
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