Empowering Remote Participation in IETF Meetings through WebRTC

Abstract

This article deals with the efforts we devoted to continuously improve the remote participation experience at IETF meetings held all over the world. In particular, it describes how WebRTC proved to be the perfect technology to make remote participation effective and interactive, thus allowing the IETF to follow a standard approach and eat its own dog food. In order to take advantage of the functionality WebRTC provides, we designed a framework based on Janus, an extensible WebRTC server we implemented ourselves. A complete overview of the tools we designed and the architecture we put in place is also presented, in order to provide the reader with a clear picture of what happens behind the curtains every time a meeting takes place.