2021/09/27 by Hyunseok Chang, Matteo Varvello, Hao Fang +2 · 1 voice · 52 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Cloud computing #Computer science #Engineering #Image and Video Quality Assessment #Multimedia #Multimedia Communication and Technology #Scope (computer science) #Session (web analytics) #Telecommunications and Broadcasting Technologies #Videoconferencing #World Wide Web #Zoom #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3487552.3487847
Accepted to ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2021, 13 pages, 19 figures
arxiv created 2021/09/27 · arxiv updated 2021/09/28 · openalex created_date 2021/10/11 · openalex publication_date 2021/11/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become the default mode of communication in our daily lives at homes, workplaces and schools, and it is likely to remain an important part of our lives in the post-pandemic world. Despite its significance, there has not been any systematic study characterizing the user-perceived performance of existing videoconferencing systems other than anecdotal reports. In this paper, we present a detailed measurement study that compares three major videoconferencing systems: Zoom, Webex and Google Meet. Our study is based on 48 hours' worth of more than 700 videoconferencing sessions, which were created with a mix of emulated videoconferencing clients deployed in the cloud, as well as real mobile devices running from a residential network. We find that the existing videoconferencing systems vary in terms of geographic scope, which in turns determines streaming lag experienced by users. We also observe that streaming rate can change under different conditions (e.g., number of users in a session, mobile device status, etc), which affects user-perceived streaming quality. Beyond these findings, our measurement methodology can enable reproducible benchmark analysis for any types of comparative or longitudinal study on available videoconferencing systems.