Evaluation of network solutions for improving WebRTC quality
Résumé
The omnipresence of real-time communication has significantly increased in recent years. Nevertheless it is treated as any best effort traffic, regardless its vulnerability to network conditions. WebRTC allows communication between browsers and uses application layer mechanisms to assure the quality (e.g. congestion control), but would benefit from network layer mechanisms. In this paper we evaluate specialized network treatment based on queuing management for uplink in wired access networks. We propose a test environment and later, based on application and network layer measurements, we assess the impact of proposed solutions on WebRTC quality. We prove that best effort is not enough to assure WebRTC communication in a presence of TCP flows and that network layer mechanisms can significantly improve the perceived quality of WebRTC communication.