tcp-to-any-proxy

Quic to TCP proxy and vice versa. or Websocket to TCP proxy and vice versa.

Just a POC built on a rainy vancouver sunday afternoon to explore the Quic Go library

In this example we have 4 nodes, as the diagram below. These are the nodes:

1. a TCP listener, that proxies to an upstream Quic server
2. a Quic listener, that proxies to an upstream TCP server
3. an Iperf3 client (tcp)
4. an Iperf3 server (tcp)

(note you can replace quic with ws to use websockets as the transport instead)

to build, run go build, then test:

Node 1 is started like this

./tcp-to-any-proxy -l 127.0.0.1:4201 -r 127.0.0.1:4202 -u quic -p tcp

Means it's listening on protocol TCP 127.0.0.1:4201, and connects to 127.0.0.1:4202 as an upstream server. The Upstream protocol is Quic

Node 2 is started like this

./tcp-to-any-proxy -l 127.0.0.1:4202 -r 127.0.0.1:4203 -u tcp -p quic 

Means it's listening on protocol Quic 127.0.0.1:4202, and connects to 127.0.0.1:4203 as an upstream server. The Upstream protocol is TCP

Node 3 is the Iperf client, which connects to the node1 (traffic will be send upstream)

iperf3 -c 127.0.0.1 -p 4201 -P 1

Node 4 is the Iperf Server, which will receive the traffic after it went through node 1 and 2, possibly with a tcp to quic to tcp translation

iperf3 -s -p 4203

websocket example:

node 1

./tcp-to-any-proxy -l 127.0.0.1:4201 -r http://127.0.0.1:4202 -p tcp -u ws

node 2

./tcp-to-any-proxy  -l 127.0.0.1:4202 -r 127.0.0.1:4203 -p ws -u tcp

Results

Using the -u and -p flag you can control the protocol between node 1 and node 2 (either tcp or quick). testing on my laptop I see quite a big difference between TCP and Quic Quic performance: ~ 1.25 Gbits/sec TCP performance: ~ 18.3 Gbits/sec

⚠️ Maybe related to TCP TSO? Likely packet size. The QUIC draft forbids using packet sizes larger than 1280 bytes (UDP packet size) if no PMTUD is done.

Update: yah, if we set the lo0 mtu to 1200 i get very similar results between "tcp-tcp" vs "quic-quic". Can't compete with bigger packets.. no matter how fancy your congestion algortihm or transport protocol us ;)