• server migration
• connection migration
• container migration
• mvfst
• proxygen
• CRIU
• QUIC

The QUIC protocol represents the latest standardised development in the field of transport protocols. Designed to make TCP obsolete, it offers the same guarantees in terms of reliability and congestion control, but with built-in support for features like secure communications, low-latency connection establishment, and client-side connection migration. The latter allows a client to seamlessly move to a new network path maintaining connectivity with the server, without the need of re-establishing the communication performing an additional handshake. The currently standardised version of QUIC limits the migration capabilities to client endpoints only, even if server-side migration has been foreseen by the original authors of the protocol. Nonetheless, the research community has already experimented the introduction of server migration in the context of QUIC, due to the potential payoff in fields like cloud and edge computing, where live relocation of virtual machines or containers holding open connections can improve the support for system management, load balancing, fault tolerance, and user mobility. In this thesis, QUIC server migration is further developed with a threefold contribution: the definition of a novel connection migration strategy, called Symmetric; the introduction of a negotiation procedure for migration protocols; and the proposal of a cross-connection synchronisation mechanism to allow server relocation when multiple clients are simultaneously connected. To prove the practical feasibility of QUIC server migration, a proof-of-concept implementation is developed by extending mvfst, a production-grade implementation of QUIC developed by Meta to offer high-performing transport services to its core business applications. Furthermore, a performance evaluation targeting possible real-life container relocation scenarios is carried out employing a realistic testbed. The assessment compares the impact of old and new connection migration strategies in presence of different network conditions, container relocation techniques, memory footprints, and traffic types.