Supercharge WebRTC: Accelerate TURN Services with eBPF/XDP

Abstract

Real-time communication (RTC) services, from videoconferencing to cloud gaming and remote rendering, are everywhere. WebRTC, an enabler technology for these applications, traditionally relies on a comprehensive NAT traversal protocol suite, most importantly, TURN, to interconnect clients and media servers behind NATs and firewalls. With the demise of residential public IP addresses, these massive-scale TURN services have become an indispensable component of WebRTC applications. Traditionally implemented as multi-protocol user-space packet relays, TURN servers are notoriously resource hungry. In this paper, we propose an eBPF/XDP offload engine to improve TURN server performance. We design a reusable eBPF/XDP TURN offload architecture, create a prototype on top of pion/turn, a popular WebRTC framework written in Go, and show on a fully functional WebRTC testbed that our offload significantly improves throughput and, more importantly, delay, by 2-3x compared to the state-of-the-art.