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Computer Science > Networking and Internet Architecture

arXiv:2109.13113 (cs)
COVID-19 e-print

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[Submitted on 27 Sep 2021]

Title:Can You See Me Now? A Measurement Study of Zoom, Webex, and Meet

Authors:Hyunseok Chang, Matteo Varvello, Fang Hao, Sarit Mukherjee
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Abstract: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.
Comments: Accepted to ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2021, 13 pages, 19 figures
Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
Cite as: arXiv:2109.13113 [cs.NI]
  (or arXiv:2109.13113v1 [cs.NI] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2109.13113
Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3487552.3487847

Submission history

From: Hyunseok Chang [view email]
[v1] Mon, 27 Sep 2021 15:00:18 UTC (12,932 KB)
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