An Empirical Evaluation of Video Conferencing Systems Used in Industry, Academia, and Entertainment

Video Conferencing Systems~(VCS) are used daily--at work, in online education, and for get-togethers with friends and family. Many new VCSs have emerged in the past decade and a new market-leader has risen during the coronavirus period of 2020. Understanding how these systems work could help us improve them rapidly. However, no experimental comparison of such systems currently exists. 

We propose a method to compare VCSs in real-world operation and implement it as a tool. Our method considers 4 main real-world experiments. Each captures different aspects, such as communication channels~(audio, video, audio-video), types of network environments~(e.g., Ethernet, WiFi, 4G), and reports system and network utilization. We conduct real-world experiments with 3 VCSs, Zoom, Microsoft Team, and Discord.

This dataset is the result of our experiments conducted with the Online Video Conference Benchmarking tool.