signaling

All posts tagged signaling

webrtcH4cKS: ~ The Minimum Viable SDP

Posted by Philipp Hancke on March 31, 2015
Posted in: Guide.
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3 comments

One evening last week, I was nerd-sniped by a question Max Ogden asked:

That is quite an interesting question. I somewhat dislike using Session Description Protocol (SDP)  in the signaling protocol anyway and prefer nice JSON objects for the API and ugly XML blobs on the wire to the ugly SDP blobs used by the WebRTC API.

The question is really about the minimum amount of information that needs to be exchanged for a WebRTC connection to succeed.

 WebRTC uses ICE and DTLS to establish a secure connection between peers. This mandates two constraints: ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Project WONDER: showing WebRTC NNI does not need SIP

Posted by Victor Pascual on September 17, 2014
Posted in: Technology.
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4 comments

As discussed in previous posts, WebRTC standards do not specify a signaling protocol. In general this decision is positive by giving developers the freedom to select (or invent) the protocol that best suits the particular WebRTC application’s needs. This can also reduce the time to market since standards compliance-related tasks are minimized. WebRTC media and data protocols from the provider to the user are standardized, so the lack of a standardized signaling protocol does not hurt interoperability of subscribers within the same network service. The calling party just has to have a URL from the called party to download its web app and to establish a WebRTC session with them. They both connect to the same web server and will then utilize the same signaling scheme. This is a new paradigm that is often difficult to embrace for traditional telephony developers who are used using the SIP protocols for handling all signaling, including the User to Network Interface (UNI) and Network-to-Network Interface (NNI). ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Signalling Options for WebRTC Applications

Posted by Victor Pascual on September 2, 2013
Posted in: Technology.
Tagged: , , , , .
17 comments

As I described in the standardization post, the model used in WebRTC for real-time, browser-based applications does not envision that the browser will contain all the functions needed to function as a telephone or video conferencing unit. Instead, is specifies the browser will contain the functions that are needed to run a Web application which would work in conjunction with back-end servers to implement telephony functions as required. According to this, WebRTC is meant to implement the media plane but to leave the signalling plane up to the application. Different applications may prefer to use different protocols, such as SIP or something custom to the particular application. In this approach, the key information that needs to be exchanged is the multimedia session description, which specifies the configuration necessary to establish the media plane. In other words, WebRTC does not specify a particular signalling model other than the generic need to exchange SDP media descriptions in the offer/answer fashion. However, the browser is totally decoupled from the actual mechanism by which these offers and answers are communicated to the remote side.  ...  Continue reading