Integrating P2PSIP into collaborative P2P applications: A case study with the P2P videoconferencing system BRAVIS

Abstract

Collaborative applications, such as videoconferencing systems, allow communication partners to interact and communicate anytime and anywhere over the Internet. Today, such applications require central servers for various functions. Even decentralized Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems still require servers for the invitation and localization of users. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is usually used for videoconferencing systems as a signaling protocol with its registration and proxy servers. This paper introduces a use case where these central SIP servers are replaced in a collaborative application with the help of the decentralized P2PSIP protocol. In the paper, we evaluate different available P2PSIP candidates and describe the integration of a chosen candidate into the P2P videoconferencing system BRAVIS. We present new insights on the practical appliance of P2PSIP for real life collaborative P2P applications along with general remarks for the integration and improvement of P2PSIP.