Optimized Video Conferencing System using Web Real Time Communication

Abstract

Abstract Video conferencing is gaining the attention of all internet users through rapid gains in performance over the past few years thanks to increasing computation power and better internet connectivity. It is easy to perform peer-to-peer video conferencing without the need of installing dying out proprietary plugins like Adobe Flash or applications, with the introduction of Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC). WebRTC is widely adopted for building up browser based video conferencing systems with the support of models like Multipoint Control Unit (MCU), Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) and Mesh model. The goal of this research project is to demonstrate how a video conferencing system can be built using SFU model and how the number of participants in a particular conference can be increased under the given conditions. The motivation for this is that the video conferencing systems that are available only supports a limited number of users per video conference. If a client wants to upgrade the number of participants more than the freely supported number a considerable fee is charged by the system. In order to tackle this problem two approaches have been explored: use audio mixing method and use changing the video quality method. The solutions for the recognized problems have been addressed by using Jitsi as the main technology and Prosody, Nginx are used as servers. The main contributions of the system were the development of webinar mode using Jitsi media server, finding the possibility of increasing the number of participants for a video conference under the given conditions by using the selected approaches. The evaluation process of webinar mode was conducted by using two user groups: expert users and nominal users. Both nominal users and expert users have responded positively to the given solution.