WebRTC-based measurement tool for peer-to-peer applications and preliminary findings with real users

TL;DR

This paper presents a WebRTC-based tool for measuring peer-to-peer performance in home networks, verifying its accuracy, and providing real-world data showing latency challenges for synchronization-dependent applications.

Contribution

Developed a web-based P2P measurement tool using WebRTC, validated its accuracy, and conducted real-world performance analysis with 10 users in Japan.

Findings

66% of peer connections had latency ≤30 ms

The tool reliably measures RTT and jitter in home environments

Performance data highlights latency issues for synchronization apps

Abstract

Direct peer-to-peer (P2P) communication is often used to minimize the end-to-end latency for real-time applications that require accurate synchronization, such as remote musical ensembles. However, there are few studies on the performance of P2P communication between home network environments, thus hindering the deployment of services that require synchronization. In this study, we developed a P2P performance measurement tool using the Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) statistics application programming interface. Using this tool, we can easily measure P2P performance between home network environments on a web browser without downloading client applications. We also verified the reliability of round-trip time (RTT) measurements using WebRTC and confirmed that our system could provide the necessary measurement accuracy for RTT and jitter measurements for real-time applications. In addition, we measured the performance of a full mesh topology connection with 10 users in an actual environment in Japan. Consequently, we found that only 66% of the peer connections had a latency of 30 ms or less, which is the minimum requirement for high synchronization applications, such as musical ensembles.