WebRTC Quality Control in Contextual Communication Systems

Sammanfattning: Audio and video communication is a universal task with a long history of technologies. Recent examples of these technologies include Skype video calling, Apple’s Face Time, and Google Hangouts. Today, these services offer everyday users the ability to have an interactive conference with both audio and video streams. However, many of these solutions depend on extra plugins or applications installing on the user’s personal computer or mobile device. Some of them also are subject to licensing, introducing a huge barrier for developers and restraining new companies from entering this area. The aim of Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is to provide direct access to multimedia streams in the browser, thus making it possible to create rich media applications using web technology without the need for plugins or developers needing to pay technology license fees. Ericsson develops solutions for communication targeting professional and business users. With the increasing possibilities to gather data (via cloud-based applications) about the quality experienced by users in their video conferences, new demands are placed on the infrastructure to handle this data. Additionally, there is a question of how the stats should be utilized to automatically control the quality of service (QoS) in WebRTC communication systems. The thesis project deployed a WebRTC quality control service with methods of data processing and modeling to assess the perceived video quality of the ongoing session, and in further produce appropriate actions to remedy poor quality. Lastly, after evaluated on the Ericsson contextual test platform, the project verified that two of the stats-parameters (network delay and packet loss percentage) for assessing QoS have the negative effect on the perceived video quality but with different influence degree. Moreover, the available bandwidth turned out to be an important factor, which should be added as an additional stats-parameter to improve the performance of a WebRTC quality control service.