Large-scale one-to-many events occur when many people want the same content at the same time. Historical use cases included IPTV, but while video-on-demand (VoD) applications rose in recent decades, demand for live streaming and large-scale software updates also increased significantly. One can think of the very recent (at the time of writing this blog) Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer, which Netflix released for only a few hours and which crashed the platform due to high demand. And we are not even talking about downloading the game, which should weigh more than 150 GB.
More examples of this have emerged in recent years, including live-streaming sports events, Fortnite, and software updates.
Three researchers from the lab attended IETF126 in Vienna, Austria.
Louis Navarre championned a Hackathon on a minimal implementation of Multicast QUIC.
They were able to live stream Louis’s Macbook webcam to 4 other devices (2 laptops and 2 phones) using their minimal Multicast QUIC implementation.
They modified three implementations: quiche, aioquic & quinn.
Additionally, Anthony Doeraene presented his paper on extending PIM to expose network capabilities for modern multicast at the ANRW 2026.
Four researchers from UCLouvain will attend IETF118 in Prague. IETF meetings are important for researchers who develop or enhance Internet protocols because they encourage interactions with engineers who deploy these protocols at a large scale. At IETF118, UCLouvain contributions will focus on QUIC, TCP, TLS and BGP.
Transport protocols such as TCP cope with packet losses by using acknowledgments and retransmissions. This technique is also used by recent protocols such as QUIC. Using retransmissions is the best approach to cope with packet losses from a bandwidth viewpoint, but they cause increases in delays and can affect latency sensitive applications.
Researchers of UCLouvain’s IP Networking Lab regularly contribute to different Internet protocols. During the last four years, Thomas Wirtgen has acquired a strong expertise in routing protocols. These protocols play a important role in the Internet since they control the paths that packet follows. There are two main classes on unicast routing protocols: (i) the intradomain routing protocols such as IS-IS and OSPF that are used inside enterprise and ISP networks and (ii) the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that is used to exchange routes between networks belonging to different companies. BGP is the glue that makes the Internet work.
