A context-aware framework for reducing bandwidth usage of mobile video chats

Mobile video chat apps offer users an approachable way to communicate with others. As high-speed 4G networks are being deployed worldwide, the number of mobile video chat app users increases. However, video chatting on mobile devices brings users financial concerns, since streaming video demands high bandwidth and can use up a large amount of data in dozens of minutes. Lowering the bandwidth usage of mobile video chats is challenging since video quality may be compromised. In this paper, we attempt to tame this challenge. Technically, we propose a context-aware frame rate adaption framework, named low-bandwidth video chat (LBVC). It follows a sender-receiver cooperative principle that smartly handles the tradeoff between lowering bandwidth usage and maintaining video quality. We implement LBVC by modifying an open-source app-Linphone- and evaluate it with both objective experiments and subjective studies.