WebRTC technologies are an opportunity for achieving a real convergence between WWW, desktop and mobile multimedia real-time communications services, which will contribute to defeating fragmentation and shall provide significant advantages to users and developers all around the world. Following this vision, in this paper we introduce Kurento, a media server technology based on open source software capable of demonstrating how this convergence could take place by combining a SIP/HTTP based signaling plane and a powerful media server infrastructure built on top of the GStreamer software stack. The presented technology is suitable for sending and delivering real-time multimedia through different protocols and formats and capable of providing advanced processing capabilities, which include media mixing, transcoding and filtering. Thanks to this, Kurento could push current WebRTC capabilities beyond plain peer-to-peer communication.
Keywords— WebRTC; SIP; HTTP; RTP; SDP; WWW/Mobile Convergence; IMS; GStreamer; Mobicents
I. INTRODUCTION Real-Time communications are one of the most relevant technologies of today’s Internet. Services such as Skype, Google Hangouts, Tokbox or Apple’s FaceTime count their users in billions. This phenomenon, joined with the popularization of social networking, is opening a new paradigm of human communications that is slowly cannibalizing the traditional phone service, which has been dominant during the last century. At the core of this new paradigm, we find two types of devices: desktop computers and Smartphone platforms. Desktop computers, through WWW browsers, have been traditionally the way users prefer to access most Internet services including social networks. However, in the last few years, Smartphone platforms have contributed with their ubiquity and mobility and their adoption is skyrocketing. The area of real-time multimedia communication services has traditionally experienced a severe fragmentation of solutions due to lack of interoperability. For this reason, the above mentioned platform diversity may aggravate the fragmentation problem. This situation is extremely negative for users, who need to deal with different services to communicate with different contacts. Clearly, this is a