Performance Characterization of Videoconferencing in the Wild

Abstract

Due to the recent “work from home” trend, recent years have seen a growing research interest in understanding existing commercial videoconferencing systems in terms of their performance and architecture. One important question left unanswered that we tackle in this paper is: what is the performance of videoconferencing in the wild? Answering this generic question is challenging because it requires, ideally, a world-wide testbed composed of diverse devices (mobile, desktop), operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and network accesses (mobile and WiFi). In this paper, we present such a testbed that we develop to evaluate videoconferencing performance in the wild via automation for Android and Chromium-based browsers. We deploy our testbed via 85 distinct devices worldwide and collect performance metrics from 58 hours’ worth of more than 2,000 videoconferencing sessions from 37 unique countries in the world. This, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest collection of videoconferencing performance data in the wild.