Performance evaluation of distributed data delivery on mobile devices using WebRTC

Direct peer-to-peer connectivity between web browsers is becoming reality with the emerging and constantly developing WebRTC technology stack. This opens possibilities for new kind of plugin-free web applications, such as browser-to-browser file transfers and multi-party conferencing. In this paper, the performance ofWebRTC on mobile devices is evaluated with different mobile device, wireless network connectivity and web browser configurations. The evaluation was conducted with a WebRTC test environment that was implemented based on PeerJS JavaScript library and PeerServer signaling server. The measurements include session establishment delay and overhead, session maintenance overhead, resource consumption of multiple simultaneous file transfers and efficiency of different file transfer approaches. Based on the results, the delay for establishing a WebRTC connection may in the worst cases exceed even 10 seconds making it a serious bottleneck. However, from the standpoints of memory consumption and CPU load, high-end mobile devices are very capable of running multiple simultaneous WebRTC connections for data transfers. The results of this paper provide new insight to researchers, application and browser developers and WebRTC standardization bodies.