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Exploiting just-noticeable difference of delays for improving quality of experience in video conferencing

This paper proposes a novel approach for improving the quality of experience (QoE) of real-time video conferencing systems. In these systems, QoE is affected by signal quality as well as interactivity, both depending on the packet loss rate, delay jitters, and mouth-to-ear delay (MED) that measures the sender-receiver delay on audio signals (and will be the same as that of video signals when video and audio is synchronized). We notice in the current Internet that increasing MED as well as reducing packet rate can help reduce the delay-aware loss rate in congested connections. Between the two methods, the former plays a more important role and applies well to a variety of network conditions for improving audiovisual signal quality, although overly increasing the MED will degrade interactivity. Based on a psychophysical concept called just-noticeable difference (JND), we find the extent to which MED can be increased, without humans perceiving the difference from the original conversation. The approach can be applied to improve existing video conferencing systems. Starting from the operating point of an existing system, we increase its MED to within JND in order to have more room for smoothing network delay spikes as well as recovering lost packets, without incurring noticeable degradation in interactivity. We demonstrate the idea on Skype and Windows Live Messenger by designing a traffic interceptor to extend their buffering time and to perform packet scheduling/recovery. Our experimental results show significant improvements in QoE, with much better signal quality while maintaining similar interactivity.