Abstract—WebRTC enables web browsers with real-time
communications capabilities via JavaScript APIs. But when the
number of the participants increases, the bandwidth and CPU
requirements have become a serious issue in a push based mesh
network. In this paper, we propose a P2P-MCU approach for
multi-party video conferencing that efficiently supports both
ordinary smart mobile phones and PCs. In our approach, a
MCU module is integrated into the browser to mix and
transcode the video & audio streams in real time. And when the
browser acts as the MCU node leaves the conference session
without notice, another candidate browser can take over the
control immediately, and the ongoing WebRTC conference can
be seamlessly recovered with our MCU selection algorithm. In
addition, our approach works under the 3G symmetric NAT
networks by using some UDP hole punching method. Our
P2P-MCU solution reduces 64% CPU usages and 35%
bandwidth consumptions for each participant compared to the
mesh-network solution in our eight-party WebRTC conference
experiments. Although the P2P-MCU module may introduce
some delay (<500ms), the delay is stable and perceptually
almost neglectable.
Index Terms—MCU, P2P, video conference, WebRTC.
Kwokfai Ng, Manyan Ching, and Yang Liu are with Hong Kong Applied
Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited, HK (e-mail:
micng@astri.org, rachelc@astri.org, yangliu@astri.org).
Tao Cai, Li Li, and Wu Chou are with Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd,
Shenzhen, China (e-mail: t.cai@huawei.com, Li.NJ.Li@huawei.com,
Wu.Chou@huawei.com).
[PDF]
Cite: Kwok-Fai Ng, Man -Yan Ching, Yang Liu, Tao Cai, Li Li, and Wu Chou, "A P2P-MCU Approach to Multi-Party Video Conference
with WebRTC," International Journal of Future Computer and Communication vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 319-324, 2014.
