Modern wireless communication is evolving to target mission-critical URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication) use cases, such as industrial automation, smart infrastructure, and vehicular telemetry. Despite these advancements, current 5G networks continue to rely on the plaintext (GPRS Tunneling Protocol – User Plane) GTP-U protocol for the user-plane transport, which lacks built-in security and integrated flow management required for modern deployments. QUICUP presents a modern alternative, theoretically offering built-in TLS 1.3 encryption and congestion control highly suitable for 5G networks. In this work, we evaluate and compare QUICUP against both standard plaintext GTP-U and GTP-U encapsulated with IPsec. We measure protocol performance across key network metrics such as encapsulation overhead, latency, throughput, jitter, and packet loss over an emulated, containerized N3 interface. Our empirical results indicate that while QUICUP successfully reduces secure encapsulation overhead by 42 bytes per packet compared to GTP-U with IPsec, it currently suffers from higher latency, lower throughput and higher packet loss under impaired radio conditions. We demonstrate that these performance bottlenecks are primarily driven by user-kernel context switching and a cross-layer conflict, where QUIC’s internet-optimized, loss-based congestion control misinterprets emulated radio-link packet loss as severe network congestion. Finally, we analyze the root causes of these limitations and outline necessary directions for future optimization to make QUICUP viable in real-world 5G environments.
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