Why so aggressive?: on the support for background transfers in WebRTC

Abstract

The WebRTC framework enables direct browser-to-browser communication for VoIP, video-conferencing but also generic javascript-based peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. In this paper, we address a major deficiency of the framework, that is the absence of a background transfer protocol. In doing so, we enable the development of un-intrusive data-intensive P2P applications, such as file-sharing and content delivery, on top of WebRTC. This work constitutes the first step in the process of studying and improving WebRTC's network stack in the context of a real use-case, that is a commercial distributed content delivery application.