High Quality Video Conferencing Final Report for COMP420Y

During a video conference between two parties, the delay needs to be low between one side talking and the other side receiving it in order to make it an effective means of communication. Traditionally Video applications have sacrificed latency for smooth video quality, using traditional CODECS such as MPEG over network protocols such as UDP. However these methods can put strain on the network with the lack of congestion control and can can cause significant latency due to the properties of MPEG. This report deals with a solution using a scalable intra-frame video CODEC that adds very little latency. Streaming it on top of an experimental network protocol named Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). DCCP can use a congestion control algorithm called TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC). This algorithm allows the video stream puts less strain on a congested network, improving network performance. It also decides when to send packets based on an allowed rate, which will produce less jitter, and less kernel queueing time. With packets arriving more consistently and with less jitter, this allows the receiver’s play-out buffer to be significantly smaller, also lowering the latency. No previous approach has combined all these elements to produce low latency video. i Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the following people for their contributions. • Richard Nelson, for supervising me and pointing me in the right direction when I needed it. • Sarah Hoefhamer, for her proof reading skills, and patience. • Sam Jansen, for all the LaTeX styles and LaTeX build system I borrowed