A Hybrid Architecture for WebRTC-Based Group Videoconferencing

To allow heterogeneous devices to participate in videoconferences without vendor-specific software, the Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) framework was developed and adopted in browsers. To overcome the limitations of peer-to-peer (P2P) topology, an architecture involving a special server called a selective forwarding unit (SFU) is usually used. We propose a hybrid architecture that groups the videoconference participants based on their “proximity,” selects a relay node for each group, and moves some part of the load from the SFU server to relay nodes. Performance evaluations showed that the proposed architecture can efficiently decrease processing and traffic load on the SFU server.