Reset the Stream, Keep the Keyframe: Partial Reliability for Media over QUIC Delivery Timeouts

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Abstract
Media over QUIC (MoQ) is the IETF's emerging transport for low-latency live video over QUIC. It carries video as a sequence of groups, each a keyframe followed by the frames that depend on it. To keep subscribers near the live edge, a relay drops media that grows too old by resetting the underlying QUIC stream with RESET_STREAM; if the keyframe was only partially delivered, the whole group becomes undecodable. The recent RESET_STREAM_AT QUIC extension instead allows a partial reset that preserves a reliable prefix of the stream, but Media over QUIC (MoQ) does not specify where to place that boundary. We propose two RESET_STREAM_AT placement strategies, protecting the keyframe or the last fully written object, and evaluate them against RESET_STREAM and a fully reliable baseline under lossy, congested, and combined conditions. RESET_STREAM_AT preserves all keyframes at no significant latency cost; RESET_STREAM's lower apparent keyframe latency is an artifact of averaging only the keyframes it delivered, omitting the ones it lost. The two also differ in stall behavior: RESET_STREAM risks multi-second freezes from consecutive keyframe loss, whereas RESET_STREAM_AT bounds each stall to roughly the duration of a single group.