Title
Video Conferencing and Flow-Rate Fairness: A First Look at Zoom and the Impact of Flow-Queuing AQM
Abstract
Congestion control is essential for the stability of the Internet and the corresponding algorithms are commonly evaluated for inter-operability based on flow-rate fairness. In contrast, video conferencing software such as Zoom uses custom congestion control algorithms whose fairness behavior is mostly unknown. Aggravatingly, video conferencing has recently seen a drastic increase in use - partly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic - and could hence negatively affect how available Internet resources are shared. In this paper, we thus investigate the flow-rate fairness of video conferencing congestion control at the example of Zoom and influences of deploying AQM. We find that Zoom is slow to react to bandwidth changes and uses two to three times the bandwidth of TCP in low-bandwidth scenarios. Moreover, also when competing with delay aware congestion control such as BBR, we see high queuing delays. AQM reduces these queuing delays and can equalize the bandwidth use when used with flow-queuing. However, it then introduces high packet loss for Zoom, leaving the question how delay and loss affect Zoom's QoE. We hence show a preliminary user study in the appendix which indicates that the QoE is at least not improved and should be studied further.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_1
PASSIVE AND ACTIVE MEASUREMENT, PAM 2021
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
12671
0302-9743
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Constantin Sander121.39
Ike Kunze231.75
Klaus Wehrle31062105.97
Jan Rüth45911.49