International audience

In this demonstration, we present a real-time videoconferencing application built on the MOQtail open-source MOQ Transport (MOQT) protocol library. Competing with WebRTC on end-to-end latency (targeting around 100 ms with a small jitter buffer), the application uniquely offers a time-travel feature: participants can instantly rewind and play another participant's last X seconds (configurable) of content to recover context missed due to late arrivals or interruptions, all while the live meeting continues uninterrupted. This capability is achieved via a single transport in which the relay caches recent media objects for on-demand retrieval. Technically, our design leverages reliable QUIC streams to manage delivery, implementing a dynamic strategy that prioritizes low latency over perfect reliability, thereby ensuring real-time performance. This demonstration, which is released as open-source code, highlights MOQT's potential to unify real-time communications with seamless media time-shifting in a single, robust protocol stack.

The Media-over-QUIC Transport (MOQT) is an emerging application-layer protocol designed for low-latency media ingestion and distribution. It is applicable in both browser scenarios (i.e., HTTP/3 Web-Transport) and non-browser settings (i.e., raw QUIC) and geared towards diverse applications, including live streaming, cloud gaming, remote desktop, video conferencing and eSports. One of the primary goals of MOQT is to allow implementers to develop a highly scalable low-latency media delivery solution. This research delves into exploring the design and implementation of a Media-over-QUIC origin and relay.

Low-Latency Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (LL-DASH) leverages Common Media Application Format's (CMAF) chunked packaging and HTTP's chunked transfer encoding capabilities to cater to the demand for media delivery with latencies of those achieved by the traditional broadcast. Nevertheless, to achieve lower latencies in a scalable and reliable way, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recently started developing a QUIC-based solution, termed Media-over-QUIC Transport (MOQT). This paper presents the first testbed to compare LL-DASH and MOQT, comparing their performance and usability under different network conditions.

With its advantages over TCP, QUIC created a new field for developing media-aware low-latency delivery solutions. The problem space is being examined by the new Media over QUIC (moq) working group in the IETF. In this paper, we study one of the initial proposals in detail, do a gap analysis and create an open-source testbed by introducing new essential features.