TrafficGrinder: A 0-RTT-Aware QUIC Load Balancer

QUIC is an emerging transport protocol, offering multiple advantages over TCP. We propose a novel 0-RTT-aware load balancing scheme for QUIC. The proposed scheme is scalable, resilient to 0-RTT replay attacks, and guarantees perfect forward secrecy. It requires no modifications to the QUIC standard and it is QUIC version independent. 0-RTT is crucial for web performance, particularly on mobile networks. Our experiments show that it reduces the time-to-first-byte by half and the server load by 40% compared to 1-RTT, regardless of the network latency. Using both synthetic and real-world traffic traces, we show that the proposed load balancer guarantees near-optimal load balancing performance. It also guarantees faster time-to-first-byte and faster completion time compared to other load balancing schemes, such as least loaded, power-of-two-choices, and maximum session affinity.