An Empirical Evaluation of Video Conferencing Systems Used in Industry, Academia and Entertainment in 2020

Video Conferencing Systems have become an important part in our everyday activities. We use it for our team meetings at work, attending lectures for our studies, even for get-togethers with friends to play an online video game. The Corona pandemic of 2020 has accelerated the use of these systems, but how much do we really know about these systems, and how much do we know about the behavior of these systems in different environments? In this paper we design and conduct real-world experiments measuring system and network utilization for different video conferencing scenarios that can occur. We find that there are indeed significant differences between these systems and their behavior in different environments, one such example is the significantly higher CPU utilization of Discord compared to Zoom and Microsoft Teams.