An empirical study of delay jitter management policies

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study of several policies for managing the effect of delay jitter on the playout of audio and video in computer-based conferences. The problem addressed is that of managing the fundamental trade-off between display with low latency and display with few gaps. We describe a particular policy calledqueue monitoring which observes delay jitter over time and dynamically adjusts display latency in order to support low-latency conferences with an acceptable gap rate. Queue monitoring is evaluated by comparing it with two policies from the literature in a study based on measurements from a computer-based conferencing system. Our results show that queue monitoring performs as well or better than the other policies over the range of observed network loads. More importantly, we show that queue monitoring performs better on those network loads for which the other policies exhibit poor performance.