The Web has introduced a new technology in a more distributed and collaborative form of communication, where the browser and the user replace the web server as the nexus of communications in a way that after the call establishment through web servers, the communication is performed directly between browsers as peer to peer fashion without intervention of the web servers. The goal of Real Time Collaboration on the World Wide Web (RTCWeb) project is to allow browsers to natively support voice, video, and gaming in interactive peer to peer communications and real time data collaboration.
Several transport protocols such as TCP, UDP, RTP, SRTP, SCTP, DCCP presently exist for communication of media and non-media data. However, a single protocol alone can not meet all the requirements of RTCWeb. Moreover, the deployment of a new transport protocol experiences problems traversing middle boxes such as Network Address Translation (NAT) box, firewall. Nevertheless, the current implementation for transportation of non-media in the very first versions of RTCWeb data does not include any congestion control on the end-points. With media (i.e., audio, video) the amount of traffic can be determined and limited by the codec and profile used during communication, whereas RTCWeb user could generate as much as non-media data to create congestion on the networks. Therefore, a suitable transport protocol stack is required that will provide congestion control, NAT traversal solution, and authentication, integrity, and privacy of user data. This master's thesis will give emphasis on the analysis of transport protocol stack for data channel in RTCWeb and selects Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), which is a reliable, message oriented general-purpose transport layer protocol, operating on top of both IPv4 and IPv6, providing congestion control similar to TCP and additionally, some new functionalities regarding security, multihoming, multistreaming, mobility, and partial reliability. However, due to the lack of universal availability of SCTP within the OS(s), it has been decided to use the SCTP userland implementation.
WebKit is an open source web browser engine for rendering web pages used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. In WebKit RTCWeb implementation using GStreamer multimedia framework, RTP/UDP is utilized for the communication of media data and UDP tunnelling for non-media data. Therefore, in order to allow a smooth integration of the implementation within WebKit, we have decided to implement GStreamer plugins using SCTP userland stack.
This thesis work also investigates the way Mozilla has integrated those protocols in the browser's network stack and how the Data Channel has been designed and implemented using SCTP userland stack.
