A Dynamic Approach to Estimate Receiving Bandwidth for WebRTC

Abstract

Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), drafted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), enables direct browser-to-browser real-time communication. As its congestion control mechanism, WebRTC uses the Google Congestion Control (GCC) algorithm. But using GCC will limit WebRTC's performance in cases of overusing due to using a fixed decreasing factor, known as alpha (a). In this paper, the authors propose a dynamic alpha model to reduce the receiving bandwidth estimate during overuse as indicated by the overuse detector. Using their proposed model, the receiver can more efficiently estimate its receiving rate in case of overuse. They implemented their model over both unconstrained and constrained networks. Experimental results show noticeable improvements in terms of higher incoming rate, lower Round-Trip Time, and lower packet loss compared to the fixed alpha model.