Scalable signaling protocol for Web real-time communication based on a distributed hash table

Jung Ha Paik, Dong Hoon Lee

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    13 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Web real-time communication (WebRTC) provides browser-to-browser communications without installing any plug-in. In WebRTC, peers have to prepare their communication session through a signaling protocol which coordinates peers and exchanges Session Description Protocol (SDP) message between two peers. The problem is that the most well known signaling method cannot provide the scalability because the method relies on only single server. To overcome the problem, this paper presents a scalable WebRTC signaling protocol. The main idea is that each peer forms a peer-to-peer topology by structuring relevant WebRTC connections with each other and then sends signals across those connections. The central server needs to handle only a few connection establishments for newly joining peers. The rest of the signaling process can be performed by peers. We define and justify such a protocol including a bootstrap method, a stabilization scheme, and peer lookup. The procedures are designed to be suitable for WebRTC connections and to be resilient against the churn condition. Furthermore, we implement the proposed protocol in pure JavaScript to show that it is realizable. The performance of the implementation is practical, with signaling latency averaging 0.5 s when the number of peers is 1000. Each peer still correctly locates the other peers even when the network is very congested.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number5101
    Pages (from-to)28-39
    Number of pages12
    JournalComputer Communications
    Volume70
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2015 Oct 1

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    This research was supported by Next-Generation Information Computing Development Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (2010-0020726)

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2015 Elsevier B.V.

    Keywords

    • Distributed hash table
    • Peer-to-peer
    • Signaling protocol
    • WebRTC

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Computer Networks and Communications

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