Enabling high frame-rate UHD real-time communication with frame-skipping

Abstract

With a high frame-rate and high bit-rate, ultra-high definition (UHD) real-time communication (RTC) users could sometimes suffer from severe service degradation. Due to the fluctuations of frames incoming and decoding at the client side, a decoder queue could be formulated before the streaming decoder at the client side. Those fluctuations could easily overload the decoder queue and introduce a noticeable delay for those queued frames. In this paper, we propose a Frame-Skipping mechanism to effectively reduce the queuing delay by actively managing the frames inside the decoder queue. We jointly optimize the frames with skipping to maintain the end-to-end delay while ensuring the decoding quality of video codec. We also mathematically quantify the potential performance with a Markovian chain. We evaluate the Frame-Skipping mechanism with our trace-driven simulation with real word UHD RTC traces. Our experiments demonstrate that Frame-Skipping can reduce the ratio of severe decoder queue delay by up to 23x and the ratio of severe total delay by up to 2.6x.