1. Introduction
HTTP semantics ([HTTP]) are used for a broad range of services on the Internet. These semantics have most commonly been used with HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. HTTP/1.1 has been used over a variety of transport and session layers, while HTTP/2 has been used primarily with TLS over TCP. HTTP/3 supports the same semantics over a new transport protocol: QUIC.
1.1. Prior Versions of HTTP
HTTP/1.1 ([HTTP/1.1]) uses whitespace-delimited text fields to convey HTTP messages. While these exchanges are human readable, using whitespace for message formatting leads to parsing complexity and excessive tolerance of variant behavior.
Because HTTP/1.1 does not include a multiplexing layer, multiple TCP connections are often used to service requests in parallel. However, that has a negative impact on congestion control and network efficiency, since TCP does not share congestion control across multiple connections.
HTTP/2 ([HTTP/2]) introduced a binary framing and multiplexing layer to improve latency without modifying the transport layer. However, because the parallel nature of HTTP/2's multiplexing is not visible to TCP's loss recovery mechanisms, a lost or reordered packet causes all active transactions to experience a stall regardless of whether that transaction was directly impacted by the lost packet.
1.2. Delegation to QUIC
The QUIC transport protocol incorporates stream multiplexing and per-stream flow control, similar to that provided by the HTTP/2 framing layer. By providing reliability at the stream level and congestion control across the entire connection, QUIC has the capability to improve the performance of HTTP compared to a TCP mapping. QUIC also incorporates TLS 1.3 ([TLS]) at the transport layer, offering comparable confidentiality and integrity to running TLS over TCP, with the improved connection setup latency of TCP Fast Open ([TFO]).
This document defines HTTP/3: a mapping of HTTP semantics over the QUIC transport protocol, drawing heavily on the design of HTTP/2. HTTP/3 relies on QUIC to provide confidentiality and integrity protection of data; peer authentication; and reliable, in-order, per-stream delivery. While delegating stream lifetime and flow-control issues to QUIC, a binary framing similar to the HTTP/2 framing is used on each stream. Some HTTP/2 features are subsumed by QUIC, while other features are implemented atop QUIC.
QUIC is described in [QUIC-TRANSPORT]. For a full description of HTTP/2, see [HTTP/2].