Enabling video conferencing in low bandwidth

Frequent disruption in network connectivity is a major challenge in offering good quality of experience to the users of smart mobile applications. Various apps like Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, etc. for online video calling have become indispensable overnight due to this new paradigm shift in home-bound remote work culture driven by the Covid19 pandemic. However, the performance of these apps is tightly bound to the current network conditions. Under limited network coverage and low bandwidth, the data frames suffer from delay, jitter, and loss resulting in degraded quality of experience for the users. In this paper, we propose a server-less peer-to-peer architecture for the video conferencing apps with in-built adaptive compression techniques. The proposed architecture enables video streaming at a very low data rate just to offer a smooth streaming experience under poor connectivity. Video is compressed by ASCII encoding on the basis of the contrast factor of each pixel in the frame. It has been observed that only 29 KBPS bandwidth is sufficient to conduct video conferencing.