WebRTC WAN Challenge Follow-Up
by Andrew Lerner | June 23, 2015 | Submit a Comment
Back in April, we issued the WebRTC WAN challenge. The premise behind this was that within a NextGen WebRTC-based conferencing solution, the audio portion of a collaboration session should take priority over video if there is WAN congestion. Here are the results.
Three vendors responded: Saisei, Talari, CloudGenix. Long story short, all three vendors solved the problem. Each was able to identify the voice and video traffic within a session by traffic flow characteristics and throttle the video traffic while the voice traffic flowed smoothly.
- One approach was to use the source UDP ports and identify traffic by packet size and rate to identify voice and video traffic.
- The other approach was to prioritize small packets (typically voice) over large packets (typically video) and use their packet encapsulation methodology to keep packets in sequence.
Cisco’s Spark and Unify’s Circuit were used as WebRTC based collaboration platforms, and each solution demonstrated how under load, the voice stream went uninterrupted as the video quality declined. This exercise validates that as video consumes a greater portion of the WAN, network architectures must evolve too. Moving forward, the success of WAN solutions will be in-part based on the ability to dynamically identify traffic by flow characteristics, not by DSCP value, IP address or TCP/UDP port as in traditional QoS schemes.
Look for a bunch of related upcoming research to hit Gartner.com in the coming weeks/months, particularly around SD-WAN.
Regards,
Andrew & Sorell
Additional Resources
View Free, Relevant Gartner Research
Gartner's research helps you cut through the complexity and deliver the knowledge you need to make the right decisions quickly, and with confidence.
Read Free Gartner Research
Category: networking sd-wan wan
Tags: cisco cloudgenix saisei talari unify webrtc
Comments or opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual contributors only, and do not necessarily represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management. Readers may copy and redistribute blog postings on other blogs, or otherwise for private, non-commercial or journalistic purposes, with attribution to Gartner. This content may not be used for any other purposes in any other formats or media. The content on this blog is provided on an "as-is" basis. Gartner shall not be liable for any damages whatsoever arising out of the content or use of this blog.