An Evaluation of HTTP/3 and WebTransport over QUIC in Live Low Latency Video Streaming

Live video streaming on the Internet has become increasingly popular in recent years. This trend highlights the need for efficient and robust streaming protocols. The advent of HTTP/3, with its core component QUIC, introduces new features that could potentially enhance media delivery in areas such as cloud gaming and real-time rendering applications. WebTransport’s ability to facilitate access of HTTP/3 and QUIC within web browsers makes it highly attractive to cloud gaming providers and game engines, which predominantly use WebRTC to stream cloud-rendered content. Accessible directly within browsers, WebRTC has been a key technology in media streaming due to its universal availability and low-latency features. However, the emerging use of WebTransport promises scalable, lower latency solutions, potentially similar to existing low-latency techniques like WebRTC. This paper analyzes the performance of HTTP/3 and WebTransport in live low latency media streaming context, discusses the possible advantages of adopting these protocols, and compares them with WebRTC. To evaluate the performance of WebTransport and HTTP/3, a comprehensive testbed was developed, enabling a comparative analysis with WebRTC focused on end-to-end latency. Utilizing the widely-used gaming engine Unity for remote rendering, we established a pipeline architecture that employs various streaming protocols. The findings reveal that WebTransport and HTTP/3 are capable of achieving low-latency levels comparable to WebRTC. This underscores the potential of HTTP/3 and WebTransport to perform well low-latency applications and require reduced configuration overhead compared to WebRTC in client-server setups.