A comparative study of RTC applications

Abstract

Real-Time Communication (RTC) applications have become ubiquitous and are nowadays fundamental for people to communicate with friends and relatives, as well as for enterprises to allow remote working and save travel costs. Countless competing platforms differ in the ease of use, features they implement, supported user equipment and targeted audience (consumer of business). However, there is no standard protocol or interoperability mechanism. This picture complicates the traffic management, making it hard to isolate RTC traffic for prioritization or obstruction. Moreover, undocumented operation could result in the traffic being blocked at firewalls or middleboxes. In this paper, we analyze 13 popular RTC applications, from widespread consumer apps, like Skype and Whatsapp, to business platforms dedicated to enterprises - Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams. We collect packet traces under different conditions and illustrate similarities and differences in their use of the network. We find that most applications employ the well-known RTP protocol, but we observe a few cases of different (and even undocumented) approaches. The majority of applications allow peer-to-peer communication during calls with only two participants. Six of them send redundant data for Forward Error Correction or encode the user video at different bitrates. In addition, we notice that many of them are easy to identify by looking at the destination servers or the domain names resolved via DNS. The packet traces we collected, along with the metadata we extract, are made available to the community.