An Experimental Study of Low-Latency Video Streaming over 5G

Low-latency video streaming over 5G has become rapidly popular over the last few years due to its increased usage in hosting virtual events, online education, webinars, and all-hands meetings. Our work aims to address the absence of studies that reveal the real-world behavior of low-latency video streaming. To that end, we provide an experimental methodology and measurements, collected in a US metropolitan area over a commercial 5G network, that correlates application-level QoE and lower-layer metrics on the devices, such as RSRP, RSRQ, handover records, etc., under both static and mobility scenarios. We find that RAN-side information, which is readily available on every cellular device, has the potential to enhance throughput estimation modules of video streaming clients, ultimately making low-latency streaming more resilient against network perturbations and handover events.