R-FEC: RL-based FEC Adjustment for Better QoE in WebRTC

The demand for video conferencing applications has seen explosive growth while users still often face unsatisfactory quality of experience (QoE). Video conferencing applications adopt Forward Error Correction (FEC) as a recovery mechanism to meet tight latency requirements and overcome packet losses prevalent in the network. However, many studies mainly focused on video rate control by neglecting the complex interactions of this video recovery mechanism on the rate control and its impact on the user QoE. Deciding the right amount of FEC for the current video rate under a dynamically changing network environment is not straightforward. For instance, the higher FEC may enhance the tolerance to packet losses, but it may increase latency due to FEC processing overhead and hurt the video quality due to the additional bandwidth used for FEC. To address this issue, we propose R-FEC which is a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework for video and FEC bitrate decisions in video conferencing. R-FEC aims to improve overall QoE by automatically learning through the results of past decisions and adjusting video and FEC bitrates to maximize the user QoE while minimizing the congestion in the network. Our experiments show that R-FEC outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions in video conferencing, with up to 27% improvement in its video rate and 6dB PSNR improvement in video quality over the default WebRTC.