QUIC transport protocol support for Tokio

QUIC is a modern transport protocol addressing shortcomings of TCP, such as head-of-line blocking, poor security, slow handshakes, and inefficient congestion control. This crate provides a portable userspace implementation.

The entry point of this crate is the Endpoint.

The futures and streams defined in this crate are not Send because they necessarily share state with eachother. As a result, they must be spawned on a single-threaded tokio runtime.

# extern crate tokio;
# extern crate quicr;
# extern crate futures;
# use futures::Future;
# fn main() {
let mut runtime = tokio::runtime::current_thread::Runtime::new().unwrap();
let mut builder = quicr::Endpoint::new();
// <configure builder>
let (endpoint, driver, _) = builder.bind("[::]:0").unwrap();
runtime.spawn(driver.map_err(|e| panic!("IO error: {}", e)));
// ...
# }

About QUIC

A QUIC connection is an association between two endpoints. The endpoint which initiates the connection is termed the client, and the endpoint which accepts it is termed the server. A single endpoint may function as both client and server for different connections, for example in a peer-to-peer application. To communicate application data, each endpoint may open streams up to a limit dictated by its peer. Typically, that limit is increased as old streams are finished.

Streams may be unidirectional or bidirectional, and are cheap to create and disposable. For example, a traditionally datagram-oriented application could use a new stream for every message it wants to send, no longer needing to worry about MTUs. Bidirectional streams behave much like a traditional TCP connection, and are useful for sending messages that have an immediate response, such as an HTTP request. Stream data is delivered reliably, and there is no ordering enforced between data on different streams.

By avoiding head-of-line blocking and providing unified congestion control across all streams of a connection, QUIC is able to provide higher throughput and lower latency than one or multiple TCP connections between the same two hosts, while providing more useful behavior than raw UDP sockets.

QUIC uses encryption and identity verification built directly on TLS 1.3. Just as with a TLS server, it is useful for a QUIC server to be identified by a certificate signed by a trusted authority. If this is infeasible--for example, if servers are short-lived or not associated with a domain name--then as with TLS, self-signed certificates can be used to provide encryption alone.