WebRTC-Based Volumetric Video Conferencing: SFU Architecture Evaluation and Benchmarking

Abstract

Immersive technologies promise to revolutionize communication through enhanced sense of presence and interactivity. To enable interaction, reliable low-latency transport mechanisms are needed to handle the large volumes of data created by complex 3D objects. In this paper, we propose an open-source, codec-independent, selective forwarding unit (SFU) for real-time volumetric video streaming using WebRTC. For evaluation purposes, we provide a reference client implementation by extending VR2Gather, a TCP-based system for immersive communication. We conduct extensive evaluations using both new and existing datasets to compare the performance of WebRTC against TCP-based protocols in an emulated testbed environment. The evaluations demonstrate that WebRTC outperforms other protocols in high-latency scenarios and adapts video quality to user movement 13% and 36% faster than its TCP-based counterparts in networks with 5 ms and 10 ms of network latency, respectively.