A System for High Precision End-to-end Delay Measurements in Video Communication

Ultra low delay video transmission is becoming increasingly important. Video-based applications with ultra low delay requirements range from teleoperation scenarios such as controlling drones or telesurgery to autonomous control of dynamic processes using computer vision algorithms applied on real-time video. To evaluate the performance of the video transmission chain in such systems, it is important to be able to precisely measure the glass-to-glass (G2G) delay of the transmitted video. In this paper, we present a low-complexity system that takes a series of pairwise independent measurements of G2G delay and derives performance metrics such as mean delay or minimum delay etc. from the data. The precision is in the sub-millisecond range, mainly limited by the sampling rate of the measurement system. In our implementation, we achieve a G2G measurement precision of 0.5 milliseconds with a sampling rate of 2kHz.