Video telephony requires high-bandwidth and low-delay voice and video transmissions between geographically distributed users. It is challenging to deliver high-quality video telephony to end-consumers through the best-effort Internet. In this paper, we present our measurement study on three popular video telephony systems on the Internet: Google+, iChat, and Skype. Through a series of carefully designed active and passive measurements, we are able to unveil important information about their key design choices and performance, including application architecture, video generation and adaptation schemes, loss recovery strategies, end-to-end voice and video delays, resilience against random and bursty losses, etc. Obtained insights can be used to guide the design of applications that call for high-bandwidth and low-delay data transmissions under a wide range of "best-effort" network conditions.

Video telephony is increasingly being adopted by end consumers. It is extremely challenging to deliver video calls over wireless networks. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on three popular mobile video call applications: FaceTime, Google Plus Hangout, and Skype, over both WiFi and Cellular links. We study the following questions: 1) how they encode/decode video in realtime under tight resource constraints on mobile devices? 2) how they transmit video smoothly in the face of various wireless network impairments? 3) what is their delivered video conferencing quality under different mobile network conditions? 4) how different system architectures and design choices contribute to their delivered quality? Through detailed analysis of measurement results, we obtain valuable insights regarding the unique challenges, advantages and disadvantages of existing design solutions, and possible directions to deliver high-quality video calls in wireless networks.

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