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Measuring the performance and network utilization of popular video conferencing applications

Authors:

Kyle MacMillan,

Nick FeamsterAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference

Pages 229 - 244

https://doi.org/10.1145/3487552.3487842

Published: 02 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Video conferencing applications (VCAs) have become a critical Internet application during the COVID-19 pandemic, as users worldwide now rely on them for work, school, and telehealth. It is thus increasingly important to understand the resource requirements of different VCAs and how they perform under different network conditions, including: how do application-layer performance metrics (e.g., resolution or frames per second) vary under different link capacity; how VCAs perform under temporary reductions in available capacity; how they compete with themselves, with each other, and with other applications; and how usage modality (e.g., gallery vs. speaker mode) affects utilization. We study three modern VCAs: Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Answers to these questions differ substantially depending on VCA. First, the average utilization on an unconstrained link varies between 0.8 Mbps and 1.9 Mbps. Given temporary reduction of capacity, some VCAs can take as long as 50 seconds to recover to steady state. Differences in proprietary congestion control algorithms also result in unfair bandwidth allocations: in constrained bandwidth settings, one Zoom video conference can consume more than 75% of the available bandwidth when competing with another VCA (e.g., Meet, Teams). For some VCAs, client utilization can decrease as the number of participants increases, due to the reduced video resolution of each participant's video stream given a larger number of participants. Finally, one participant's viewing mode (e.g., pinning a speaker) can affect the upstream utilization of other participants.

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Cited By

Kataria BLNU PBothra RGandhi RBhattacherjee DPadmanabhan VAtov IRamakrishnan SChaturmohta SKotipalli CLiang RSueda KHe XHinton K(2024)Saving Private WAN: Using Internet Paths to Offload WAN Traffic in Conferencing ServicesProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36964042:CoNEXT4(1-22)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696404
Yi FWan HJamieson KRexford JXie YMichel O(2024)Athena: Seeing and Mitigating Wireless Impact on Video Conferencing and BeyondProceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3696348.3696889(103-110)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696348.3696889
Li HLiu YCheng YRay SDu KJiang J(2024)Eloquent: A More Robust Transmission Scheme for LLM Token StreamingProceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Networks for AI Computing10.1145/3672198.3673797(34-40)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Index Terms

Measuring the performance and network utilization of popular video conferencing applications
1. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Multimedia information systems
      1. Multimedia streaming
2. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference

November 2021

768 pages

ISBN:9781450391290

DOI:10.1145/3487552

General Chairs:
Dave Levin
University of Maryland
,
Alan Mislove
Northeastern University
,
Program Chairs:
Johanna Amann
International Computer Science Institute
,
Matthew Luckie
University of Waikato

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 02 November 2021

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IMC '21: ACM Internet Measurement Conference

November 2 - 4, 2021

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Kataria BLNU PBothra RGandhi RBhattacherjee DPadmanabhan VAtov IRamakrishnan SChaturmohta SKotipalli CLiang RSueda KHe XHinton K(2024)Saving Private WAN: Using Internet Paths to Offload WAN Traffic in Conferencing ServicesProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36964042:CoNEXT4(1-22)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696404
Yi FWan HJamieson KRexford JXie YMichel O(2024)Athena: Seeing and Mitigating Wireless Impact on Video Conferencing and BeyondProceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3696348.3696889(103-110)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696348.3696889
Li HLiu YCheng YRay SDu KJiang J(2024)Eloquent: A More Robust Transmission Scheme for LLM Token StreamingProceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Networks for AI Computing10.1145/3672198.3673797(34-40)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672198.3673797
Chu AJiang XLiu SBhagoji ABronzino FSchmitt PFeamster N(2024)Feasibility of State Space Models for Network Traffic GenerationProceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Networks for AI Computing10.1145/3672198.3673792(9-17)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Wang YLyu MSivaraman V(2024)Standardizing Multimedia QoE Telemetry from Telecommunications Networks for Open AnalyticsProceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Emerging Multimedia Systems10.1145/3672196.3673400(14-20)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Zhang ZZhu XZhang AQian FCai JKankanhalli MPrabhakaran BBoll SSubramanian RZheng LSingh VCesar PXie LXu D(2024)An In-depth Study of Bandwidth Allocation across Media Sources in Video ConferencingProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3681007(7696-7704)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
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