Puneet Kumar

Date of Award

6-12-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2025

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Behnam Dezfouli

Abstract

Transport and security layer protocols are fundamental to ensuring reliable and secure communication between endpoints. Among transport-layer protocols, TCP is the most widely deployed; however, it su↵ers from several limitations that impact performance, including high per-packet overhead, expensive connection re-establishment, and low per-byte protocol efficiency. To address these shortcomings, the IETF standardized QUIC, a modern UDP-based transport protocol implemented in userspace. QUIC integrates transport and cryptographic features, including packet encryption, retransmission, multiplexing, and stream management, while emulating connection-oriented behavior atop UDP, which is a connectionless protocol. This thesis investigates the limitations of traditional TCP and QUIC in the context of IoT and SDN environments. It presents three enhanced variants of QUIC designed to reduce overhead and improve efficiency in these domains: (i) MQTT over QUIC for IoT messaging; (ii) quicSDN for control plane communication in SDN infrastructures; and (iii) kQUIC, a kernel-space implementation that eliminates userspace system call overhead and improves throughput. The proposed solutions are evaluated using both analytical models and empirical experiments. Results indicate that userspace QUIC is suboptimal for constrained environments and SDN due to integration complexity, communication and system call overhead. The enhanced variants significantly outperform both TCP and standard QUIC in terms of throughput, system resource utilization, connection robustness, and acknowledgment efficiency.

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