Vidaptive: Efficient and Responsive Rate Control for Real-Time Video on Variable Networks

Abstract: Real-time video streaming relies on rate control mechanisms to adapt video bitrate to network capacity while maintaining high utilization and low delay. However, the current video rate controllers, such as Google Congestion Control (GCC), are very slow to respond to network changes, leading to link under-utilization and latency spikes. While recent delay-based congestion control algorithms promise high efficiency and rapid adaptation to variable conditions, low-latency video applications have been unable to adopt these schemes due to the intertwined relationship between video encoders and rate control in current systems. This paper introduces Vidaptive, a new rate control mechanism designed for low-latency video applications. Vidaptive decouples packet transmission decisions from encoder output, injecting ``dummy'' padding traffic as needed to treat video streams akin to backlogged flows controlled by a delay-based congestion controller. Vidaptive then adapts the target bitrate of the encoder based on delay measurements to align the video bitrate with the congestion controller's sending rate. Our evaluations atop Google's implementation of WebRTC show that, across a set of cellular traces, Vidaptive achieves ~1.5x higher video bitrate and 1.4 dB higher SSIM, 1.3 dB higher PSNR, and 40% higher VMAF, and it reduces 95th-percentile frame latency by 2.2 s with a slight 17 ms increase in median frame latency.