title: Video conferences through the internet: how to survive in a hostile environment.
abstract: This paper analyzes and compares two different video conference solutions, widely used in corporate and home environments, with a special focus on the mechanisms used for adapting the traffic to the network status. The results show how these mechanisms are able to provide a good quality in the hostile environment of the public Internet, a best effort network without delay or delivery guarantees. Both solutions are evaluated in a laboratory, where different network impairments (bandwidth limit, delay, and packet loss) are set, in both the uplink and the downlink, and the reaction of the applications is measured. The tests show how these solutions modify their packet size and interpacket time, in order to increase or reduce the sent data. One of the solutions also uses a scalable video codec, able to adapt the traffic to the network status and to the end devices.
authors.affiliation: Communication Technologies Group (GTC), Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) EINA, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fernández
authors.affiliation: Communication Technologies Group (GTC), Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) EINA, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Jose
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-6977-6363
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Saldana
authors.affiliation: Communication Technologies Group (GTC), Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) EINA, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Julián
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fernández-Navajas
authors.affiliation: Communication Technologies Group (GTC), Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) EINA, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Luis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Sequeira
authors.affiliation: Communication Technologies Group (GTC), Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) EINA, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Luis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Casadesus
mesh_terms: D020407:Internet; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D049269:Videoconferencing