WebRTC over 5 G: A Study of Remote Collaboration QoS in Mobile Environment

Abstract The increasing demand for remote collaboration and remote working has become crucial to daily life owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and the development of internet-based video distribution services. Furthermore, low-latency remote collaboration, such as teleoperation and support applications designed for in-vehicle environments, has gained considerable attention. The 5 G technology is considered as a key infrastructure for remote collaboration. This study aimed to evaluate the actual 5 G capability to achieve high quality of service (QoS) for remote collaboration. We designed and implemented a measurement tool to monitor the QoS of remote collaboration under real-world 5 G conditions. We performed measurements encompassing the various 5 G frequency bands. During these experiments, we employed various tools to obtain detailed mobile signal conditions to analyze the relationship between various environmental factors (e.g. signal quality, band, handoff, geographic conditions, and mobility) and the QoS performance of remote collaboration in a real-world 5 G environment. This study elucidated the correlation between the WebRTC performance and various environmental factors as well as the performance improvement potential by leveraging the communication technologies of multiple mobile carriers. The collected data has been made publicly available to foster research on QoS and 5 G.