Peer-to-Peer Video Call with WebRTC

Throughout the last decade we have witnessed a great evolution of the World Wide Web. Web pages have transitioned from static information to fully fledged applications with great interactivity and functionality. Videoconference has also been affected by this trend. Multimedia communication applications started to pop up in our web browsers enabled by proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe Flash. While these products in many cases provided complete videoconferencing and collaborative experiences, they frequently relied on proprietary solutions and protocols imposed by the developer of the browser plug-in instead of well-known standards. Lately, effort has been put to provide web browsers and pages with more functionality and interactivity without the need of relying on proprietary plug-ins. In this context, WebRTC is being defined and developed to offer real-time peer-to-peer communications to the web taking advantage of HTML5 and existent real-time protocols and codecs instead of defining new ones. WebRTC is a joint effort by the WebRTC working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the rtcweb group from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) where the first provide the HTML and JavaScript API and the latter defines the protocols and codecs to be used in the communication. This paper describes the WebRTC technology and implementation of WebRTC client, server and signaling. Main parts of the WebRTC API are described and explained. This will leverage the browser with ability to host P2P multimedia streaming applications in a straightforward manner without having to install plugins or download the application.