Human-in-the-Loop Bandwidth Estimation for Quality of Experience Optimization in Real-Time Video Communication

Abstract

The quality of experience (QoE) delivered by video conferencing systems is significantly influenced by accurately estimating the time-varying available bandwidth between the sender and receiver. Bandwidth estimation for real-time communications remains an open challenge due to rapidly evolving network architectures, increasingly complex protocol stacks, and the difficulty of defining QoE metrics that reliably improve user experience. In this work, we propose a deployed, human-in-the-loop, data-driven framework for bandwidth estimation to address these challenges. Our approach begins with training objective QoE reward models derived from subjective user evaluations to measure audio and video quality in real-time video conferencing systems. Subsequently, we collect roughly $1$M network traces with objective QoE rewards from real-world Microsoft Teams calls to curate a bandwidth estimation training dataset. We then introduce a novel distributional offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to train a neural-network-based bandwidth estimator aimed at improving QoE for users. Our real-world A/B test demonstrates that the proposed approach reduces the subjective poor call ratio by $11.41\%$ compared to the baseline bandwidth estimator. Furthermore, the proposed offline RL algorithm is benchmarked on D4RL tasks to demonstrate its generalization beyond bandwidth estimation.