A performance evaluation of WebRTC over LTE

In perspective, the effectiveness and attractiveness of multimedia communications rely both on such disruptive services as Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), and on such reliable mobile infrastructures as Long Term Evolution (LTE). WebRTC is the innovative protocol letting HTML5 compliant browsers to communicate in real-time using a peer-to-peer architecture. LTE on the other hand, is the current technology for mobile communication systems as standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). In this work, we focus on WebRTC over LTE. We realized a testbed based on NS-3 framework including: i) some LTE customized modules ii) an ad hoc server providing a set of services for WebRTC call setup iii) two mobile clients equipped with a HTML5 browser for WebRTC audio/video call support. Several multimedia WebRTC flows between the two clients have been analyzed and empirical CDFs of typical performance figures including throughput, jitter, and packet loss have been derived under different LTE scenarios.