WebRTC and the Ocean of Acronyms

My experience getting started with WebRTC can be summarised in a three letter acronym so I decided to write this article dedicated to answering my many questions. I’ve always said, if you don’t know an acronym, it’s probably a networking protocol.

What is ICE?

Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is a framework to allow your web browser to connect with peers. There are many reasons why a straight up connection from Peer A to Peer B simply won’t work. It needs to bypass firewalls that would prevent opening connections, give you a unique address if like most situations your device doesn’t have a public IP address, and relay data through a server if your router doesn’t allow you to directly connect with peers. ICE uses some of the following techniques described below to achieve this:

What is STUN?

Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) (acronym within an acronym) is a protocol to discover your public address and determine any restrictions in your router that would prevent a direct connection with a peer.

The client will send a request to a STUN server on the internet who will reply with the client’s public address and whether or not the client is accessible behind the router’s NAT.

What is NAT?

Network Address Translation (NAT) is used to give your device a public IP address. A router will have a public IP address and every device connected to the router will have a private IP address. Requests will be translated from the device’s private IP to the router’s public IP with a unique port. That way you don’t need a unique public IP for each device but can still be discovered on the internet.

Some routers will have restrictions on who can connect to devices on the network. This can mean that even though we have the public IP address found by the STUN server, not anyone can create a connection. In this situation we need to turn to TURN.

What is TURN?

Some routers using NAT employ a restriction called ‘Symmetric NAT’. This means the router will only accept connections from peers you’ve previously connected to.

Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) is meant to bypass the Symmetric NAT restriction by opening a connection with a TURN server and relaying all information through that server. You would create a connection with a TURN server and tell all peers to send packets to the server which will then be forwarded to you. This obviously comes with some overhead so is only used if there are no other alternatives.

What is SDP?

Session Description Protocol (SDP) is a standard for describing the multimedia content of the connection such as resolution, formats, codecs, encryption, etc so that both peers can understand each other once the data is transferring. This is not the media itself but more the metadata.

What is an Offer/Answer and Signal Channel?

Unfortunately WebRTC can’t create connections without some sort of server in the middle. We call this the Signal Channel. It’s any sort of channel of communication to exchange information before setting up a connection, whether by email, post card or a carrier pigeon… it’s up to you.

The information we need to exchange is the Offer and Answer which just contains the SDP mentioned above.

Peer A who will be the initiator of the connection, will create an Offer. They will then send this offer to Peer B using the chosen signal channel. Peer B will receive the Offer from the signal channel and create an Answer. They will then send this back to Peer A along the signal channel.

What is an ICE candidate?

As well as exchanging information about the media (discussed above in Offer/Answer and SDP), peers must exchange information about the network connection. This is know as an ICE candidate and details the available methods the peer is able to communicate (directly or through a TURN server).

The entire exchange in a complicated diagram

image

About Louis Stowasser

I am a Partner Engineer for Mozilla, maintainer of Gamedev Weekly and creator of the CraftyJS game engine, based in Brisbane Australia.

More articles by Louis Stowasser…

About Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]

Technical Evangelist & Editor of Mozilla Hacks. Gives talks & blogs about HTML5, JavaScript & the Open Web. Robert is a strong believer in HTML5 and the Open Web and has been working since 1999 with Front End development for the web - in Sweden and in New York City. He regularly also blogs at http://robertnyman.com and loves to travel and meet people.

More articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]…


6 comments

  1. Chris Allen

    Really clear, so really useful.

    I have to ask – why have we got ourselves into this state? It is not just the tcp/ip protocols that give us an internet where the number of devices may vastly exceed the limited address space. It is also the ridiculous over-profusion of checks and blocks in firewalls and cisco routers.
    We still need to develop a simple parallel set of protocols to permit server-less peer2peer connections. Anyone with me on this?

    July 23rd, 2013 at 13:19

    1. Fabrizzio Rivera

      100% agree with you Chris.
      Despite the security issues to consider, i do share your thought about by a simple P2P protocol (maybe including a handshake based on any type of credentials), should make the life more aesy.

      July 24th, 2013 at 12:13

    2. Robert Reese

      Chris, there is nothing ridiculous about the checks and blocks in firewalls and routers. I’m sorry that you consider security to be inconvenient. However, it is ridiculous to remove security just for the sake of convenience.

      Indeed, security is why I’d prefer to not have WebRTC enabled by default. Luckily, I found the not-so-easy method of disabling it in Firefox 23. Sadly, the vast majority of the users don’t even know it exists, much less enabled.

      No, I’m not with you on this one bit.

      August 10th, 2013 at 03:10

  2. Luis

    This is the main reason I have not implemented a WebRTC teleconferencing solution. These acronyms scared me away.

    July 24th, 2013 at 18:19

  3. Website Developer Brisbane

    i agree with your view point chris :)

    July 25th, 2013 at 03:30

  4. Stephan

    Any timeline for WebRTC support on Firefox OS?

    July 26th, 2013 at 21:22

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