Just a Drop

Applications sensitive to latency, such as video web meetings, are particularly vulnerable to end-to-end delays. Network congestion greatly contributes to end-to-end delay, and it can lead to packet loss and jitter. Congestion control mechanisms regulate data flow to mitigate these delays, often resulting in queues at the sender’s end. For applications prioritizing timeliness over reliability, discarding outdated video frames from the queue reduce queue size and subsequent delays. However, this frame-dropping practice can introduce visual artifacts. This study proposes a deadline-centric approach to video transmission that strategically removes frames exceeding a certain waiting time from the queue, aiming to strike a good balance between latency reduction and video quality preservation.