ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss

Video chat is increasingly popular among Internet users. Often, however, chatting sessions suffer from packet loss, which causes video outage and poor quality. Existing solutions however are unsatisfying. Retransmissions increase the delay and hence can interact negatively with the strict timing req...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Jue, Katabi, Dina
Other Authors: Dina Katabi
Published: 2010
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/56252
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author Wang, Jue
Katabi, Dina
author2 Dina Katabi
author_facet Dina Katabi
Wang, Jue
Katabi, Dina
author_sort Wang, Jue
collection MIT
description Video chat is increasingly popular among Internet users. Often, however, chatting sessions suffer from packet loss, which causes video outage and poor quality. Existing solutions however are unsatisfying. Retransmissions increase the delay and hence can interact negatively with the strict timing requirements of interactive video. FEC codes introduce extra overhead and hence reduce the bandwidth available for video data even in the absence of packet loss. This paper presents ChitChat, a new approach for reliable video chat that neither delays frames nor introduces bandwidth overhead. The key idea is to ensure that the information in each packet describes the whole frame. As a result, even when some packets are lost, the receiver can still use the received packets to decode a smooth version of the original frame. This reduces frame loss and the resulting video freezes and improves the perceived video quality. We have implemented ChitChat and evaluated it over multiple Internet paths. In comparison to Windows Live Messenger 2009, our method reduces the occurrences of video outage events by more than an order of magnitude.
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spelling mit-1721.1/562522019-04-13T00:24:11Z ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss Wang, Jue Katabi, Dina Dina Katabi Networks & Mobile Systems Video chat is increasingly popular among Internet users. Often, however, chatting sessions suffer from packet loss, which causes video outage and poor quality. Existing solutions however are unsatisfying. Retransmissions increase the delay and hence can interact negatively with the strict timing requirements of interactive video. FEC codes introduce extra overhead and hence reduce the bandwidth available for video data even in the absence of packet loss. This paper presents ChitChat, a new approach for reliable video chat that neither delays frames nor introduces bandwidth overhead. The key idea is to ensure that the information in each packet describes the whole frame. As a result, even when some packets are lost, the receiver can still use the received packets to decode a smooth version of the original frame. This reduces frame loss and the resulting video freezes and improves the perceived video quality. We have implemented ChitChat and evaluated it over multiple Internet paths. In comparison to Windows Live Messenger 2009, our method reduces the occurrences of video outage events by more than an order of magnitude. 2010-07-07T21:15:12Z 2010-07-07T21:15:12Z 2010-07-05 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/56252 MIT-CSAIL-TR-2010-031 12 p. application/pdf
spellingShingle Wang, Jue
Katabi, Dina
ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss
title ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss
title_full ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss
title_fullStr ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss
title_full_unstemmed ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss
title_short ChitChat: Making Video Chat Robust to Packet Loss
title_sort chitchat making video chat robust to packet loss
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/56252
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