🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a fully decentralized web-based multiparty video conferencing system that eliminates the need for centralized media servers, thereby addressing the high costs and architectural complexity inherent in traditional approaches. By leveraging only lightweight notification services—such as email or push notifications—for signaling, the system establishes peer-to-peer (P2P) connections directly between clients to transmit audio, video, screen sharing, and text messages. Built upon WebRTC data channels and media streams, and implemented via browser extensions or Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), the solution significantly reduces deployment and operational overhead. This approach offers an efficient and practical decentralized conferencing alternative, particularly well-suited for resource-constrained environments.
📝 Abstract
We present the software architecture and implementation of our web-based multiparty video conference application. It does not use a media server. For call signaling, it either piggybacks on existing push notifications via a lightweight notification server, or utilizes email messages to further remove that server dependency. For conference control and data storage, it creates a peer-to-peer network of the clients participating in the call. Our prototype client web app can be installed as a browser extension, or a progressive web app on desktop and mobile. It uses WebRTC data channels and media streams for the control and media paths in implementing a full featured video conferencing with audio, video, text and screen sharing. The challenges faced and the techniques used in creating our lightweight or serverless system are useful to other low-end WebRTC applications that intend to save cost on server maintenance or paid subscriptions for multiparty video calls.