Zoom Session Quality: A Network-Level View

Zoom is a popular videoconferencing application for remote work and learning. In 2020, our university adopted Zoom for delivering online lectures during work-from-home restrictions. Starting in September 2021, however, our university offered both in-person and online classes, leading to increased Zoom usage on our campus network. In this paper, we study this Zoom network traffic in two different ways. First, we perform small-scale active measurements on individual Zoom test sessions to understand communication patterns and traffic structure. Second, we use large-scale passive measurement of campus-level Zoom traffic to understand usage patterns and performance problems. Our results identify 4x growth in Zoom traffic on our campus network since 2020, as well as network-related issues that affect Zoom session quality.