An empirical evaluation of VoIP playout buffer dimensioning in Skype, Google talk, and MSN Messenger

Authors:
Chen-Chi Wu;Kuan-Ta Chen;Chun-Ying Huang;Chin-Laung Lei
Affiliations:
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc
Venue:
Proceedings of the 18th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Year:
2009

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Abstract

VoIP playout buffer dimensioning has long been a challenging optimization problem, as the buffer size must maintain a balance between conversational interactivity and speech quality. The conversational quality may be affected by a number of factors, some of which may change over time. Although a great deal of research effort has been expended in trying to solve the problem, how the research results are applied in practice is unclear. In this paper, we investigate the playout buffer dimensioning algorithms applied in three popular VoIP applications, namely, Skype, Google Talk, and MSN Messenger. We conduct experiments to assess how the applications adjust their playout buffer sizes. Using an objective QoE (Quality of Experience) metric, we show that Google Talk and MSN Messenger do not adjust their respective buffer sizes appropriately, while Skype does not adjust its buffer at all. In other words, they could provide better QoE to users by improving their buffer dimensioning algorithms. Moreover, none of the applications adapts its buffer size to the network loss rate, which should also be considered to ensure optimal QoE provisioning.