Performance Analysis of Video Calls Using Skype |
The widespread use of the Internet has had a significant impact on the world of communication, leading to the development of new technologies. One of these new technologies, VoIP (voice/video-over-Internet protocol), has revolutionised contemporary communication. Skype is undoubtedly the most well-known VoIP application in the current spectrum. Its features, capabilities and successes have attracted the research community and telecommunication companies, which have become interested in illustrating Skype’s performance, characteristics, quality and end user experience. This paper focuses on investigating Skype’s responsiveness mechanism toward bandwidth variation. Skype’s sending bit rate and packet size when experiencing different levels of packet loss will be studied as well. In addition, we focus on how Skype shares its available bandwidth with other cross-traffic such as TCP traffic. Moreover, we measure end user quality of experience (QoE) under different packet loss conditions. This paper offers a number of key findings, including the fact that Skype responsiveness to bandwidth variation very dependent on the speed motion of the video calls. In addition, Skype is robust regarding minor packet loss. We also found that Skype is indeed TCP-friendly and reacts effectively to congestion. Furthermore, we have determined that the acceptable quality for the end user when Skype video calls experience different levels of packet loss is 8% of loss; beyond that, the user will not tolerate poor quality.
Asiri A, Sun L