ACM MMSys 2024 Bandwidth Estimation in Real Time Communications Challenge

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Khairy, Sami, Mittag, Gabriel, Gopal, Vishak, Yan, Francis Y., Niu, Zhixiong, Ameri, Ezra, Inglis, Scott, Golestaneh, Mehrsa, Cutler, Ross
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Khairy, Sami
Mittag, Gabriel
Gopal, Vishak
Yan, Francis Y.
Niu, Zhixiong
Ameri, Ezra
Inglis, Scott
Golestaneh, Mehrsa
Cutler, Ross
author_facet Khairy, Sami
Mittag, Gabriel
Gopal, Vishak
Yan, Francis Y.
Niu, Zhixiong
Ameri, Ezra
Inglis, Scott
Golestaneh, Mehrsa
Cutler, Ross
contents The quality of experience (QoE) delivered by video conferencing systems to end users depends in part on correctly estimating the capacity of the bottleneck link between the sender and the receiver over time. Bandwidth estimation for real-time communications (RTC) remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the continuously evolving heterogeneous network architectures and technologies. From the first bandwidth estimation challenge which was hosted at ACM MMSys 2021, we learned that bandwidth estimation models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) in simulations to maximize network-based reward functions may not be optimal in reality due to the sim-to-real gap and the difficulty of aligning network-based rewards with user-perceived QoE. This grand challenge aims to advance bandwidth estimation model design by aligning reward maximization with user-perceived QoE optimization using offline RL and a real-world dataset with objective rewards which have high correlations with subjective audio/video quality in Microsoft Teams. All models submitted to the grand challenge underwent initial evaluation on our emulation platform. For a comprehensive evaluation under diverse network conditions with temporal fluctuations, top models were further evaluated on our geographically distributed testbed by using each model to conduct 600 calls within a 12-day period. The winning model is shown to deliver comparable performance to the top behavior policy in the released dataset. By leveraging real-world data and integrating objective audio/video quality scores as rewards, offline RL can therefore facilitate the development of competitive bandwidth estimators for RTC.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_06324
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ACM MMSys 2024 Bandwidth Estimation in Real Time Communications Challenge
Khairy, Sami
Mittag, Gabriel
Gopal, Vishak
Yan, Francis Y.
Niu, Zhixiong
Ameri, Ezra
Inglis, Scott
Golestaneh, Mehrsa
Cutler, Ross
Networking and Internet Architecture
Multimedia
The quality of experience (QoE) delivered by video conferencing systems to end users depends in part on correctly estimating the capacity of the bottleneck link between the sender and the receiver over time. Bandwidth estimation for real-time communications (RTC) remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the continuously evolving heterogeneous network architectures and technologies. From the first bandwidth estimation challenge which was hosted at ACM MMSys 2021, we learned that bandwidth estimation models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) in simulations to maximize network-based reward functions may not be optimal in reality due to the sim-to-real gap and the difficulty of aligning network-based rewards with user-perceived QoE. This grand challenge aims to advance bandwidth estimation model design by aligning reward maximization with user-perceived QoE optimization using offline RL and a real-world dataset with objective rewards which have high correlations with subjective audio/video quality in Microsoft Teams. All models submitted to the grand challenge underwent initial evaluation on our emulation platform. For a comprehensive evaluation under diverse network conditions with temporal fluctuations, top models were further evaluated on our geographically distributed testbed by using each model to conduct 600 calls within a 12-day period. The winning model is shown to deliver comparable performance to the top behavior policy in the released dataset. By leveraging real-world data and integrating objective audio/video quality scores as rewards, offline RL can therefore facilitate the development of competitive bandwidth estimators for RTC.
title ACM MMSys 2024 Bandwidth Estimation in Real Time Communications Challenge
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06324