Using Socket.io Approach for Many-to-Many Bi-Directional Video Conferencing

Abstract

Video conferencing has become a critical need in today’s world due to its importance in education and business to mention a few; also, recent years have witnessed a great revolution in communication technologies. However, there still exist limitations in these technologies in terms of the quality of communication established between two peers. Therefore, many solutions have been suggested for a variety of video conferencing applications. One of these technologies is Web Real-Time Communication technology (WebRTC). WebRTC provides the ability to efficiently perform peer-to-peer communication, which improves the quality of the communication. This work tries to propose a WebRTC bi-directional video conferencing for many-to-many (mesh topology) peers. In this work, signaling was obtained using Socket.io Library. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach was performed in terms of CPU performance, and Quality of Experience (QoE). Moreover, to validate the simulations results, a real implementation was achieved based on the following scenarios a) involving several peers, b) at the same time, opening several video rooms, c) a session will still be active even when the room initiator leaves, and d) new users can be shared with currently involved participants.