Client-Based Distributed Video Conferencing via WebRTC

—The most common video conferencing topologies are mesh and star topologies. The star topology requires a powerful server which leads to high costs. In the mesh topology, this is not the case, as each participant is directly connected to every other participant. However, due to the load caused by the numerous connections, the mesh topology is not suitable for larger video conferences. In this paper, we propose a video conferencing service that combines the advantages of the mesh and star topologies to enable larger video conferences without the need for powerful servers. This is achieved by distributing the video streams over the most powerful participants instead of a server. The resulting system achieves an improvement in video quality compared to a reference test in the mesh topology, which was determined based on the transmission rate and frame rate.