Web-based real-time communication based collaboration: An evaluation study of the DataChannel

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2014-03-31

Department

Major/Subject

Networking Technology

Mcode

S3029

Degree programme

TLT - Master’s Programme in Communications Engineering

Language

en

Pages

72+12

Series

Abstract

Real-time communication evolved from the traditional telephony network to Internet-based audio/video conferencing tools and instant messaging software. Third-party plug-ins and extensions added the same capabilities to Web-based browser applications. Vendor-specific heterogeneity in software and hardware requirements brought up interoperability issues. There were no common set of communication protocols. The Web browser as a universal access point to the Web was facing a challenge in real-time communication. To natively support real-time communication in the Web browser, Web-based Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) was introduced. It provides three main features i.e. access to the user's hardware, peer-to-peer connection between the browsers and arbitrary data exchange through its DataChannel application programming interface (API). These features are added in the browser as one extra protocol stack that can be accessed by a Web application with JavaScript API's. The DataChannel API provides several use cases and it is interesting to examine the behavior of the WebRTC DataChannel from the point of view of developers, enterprises, Web services and service providers. In this thesis we investigate the WebRTC DataChannel API. We design and implement two prototypes of a WebRTC based collaboration application. These were based on the respective specification by the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers. A case study is proposed for data communication between two collaborative environments one consisting of an enterprise tool and the other being a non-enterprise tool based on WebRTC DataChannel and IP Multimedia Subsystem. The performance evaluation of the implementation is also carried out by comparing various other tools in a controlled environment.

Description

Supervisor

Ott, Jörg

Thesis advisor

Mecklin, Tomas

Keywords

WebRTC, DataChannel, real-time communication, enterprise, collaboration, IP multimedia subsystem.

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Citation