Oracle Makes WebRTC Easier on the Backend

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Traditional phone calls over the telephone network are going the way of the Dodo bird. Users, especially the millennial generation, have tasted video calling and now voice alone just won’t do in many cases.

The challenge is delivering videoconferencing and digital voice solutions that work for the consumer as easily as traditional calling, however; anyone who has launched Skype (News - Alert) knows that half a conversation or more can be burned just getting the technology working right—and Skype is on the easy side of videoconferencing.

That’s where WebRTC comes into the picture; WebRTC enables users to seamlessly communicate in high definition video and/or voice with shared screen capabilities over standard web browsers. Video calling just works. At least for the end user; for developers WebRTC can be a nightmare without the right tools.

Specifically, on the backend sophisticated server-side applications must be developed to address application control and synchronization during network changes and browser page reloads, rapid application integration with existing systems, identity management between multiple devices and across web and telephony domains, border and application security to prevent attacks and service abuse, high capacity media handling for NAT traversal, encryption, and transcoding, as well as robust and dynamic interworking with existing infrastructure.

Not so easy.

Unless you leverage the new Oracle (News - Alert) Communications WebRTC Session Controller. The controller is a highly available, carrier grade solution designed to enable rapid development and deployment of powerful and differentiating WebRTC applications, according to Oracle. It is based on proven technologies from the Oracle Communications service delivery platform product family, and brings carrier grade network capabilities into the web domain enabling communications service providers to create a new form of high quality communications for their users.

The Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller is composed of three components. First, there is a signaling engine for interworking between JavaScript based web-clients using signaling over WebSockets and SIP signaling into the core network. Second, there’s a media engine for interworking between WebRTC-associated media and SIP-associated media. Finally, there’s the client software development kit, an extensible kit to assist with rapid RTC application development.

Three aspects that Oracle stresses with the controller are reliability, interoperability and security, key concerns for any credible WebRTC technology.

It features rehydration for users, which automatically reestablishes dropped WebRTC sessions regardless of cause. From developers, it features a distributed, highly available signaling and media architecture delivering carrier-grade scalability with media anchoring for NAT traversal and SRTP termination.

In terms of interoperability, the client SDK speeds development with an extensible JavaScript based environment providing automatic browser mediation, client authentication, session management, and connection control, the signaling and media engines bridge WebRTC to existing networks with WebRTC to SIP/IMS signaling and WebRTC media to existing VoIP system media, and the media engine provides scalable network-based media anchoring for NAT traversal, de-encryption and re-encryption to accommodate different standards, codec transcoding and multi-vendor interoperability to normalize implementation differences.

From a security perspective, the Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller includes web-based user authentication implementing the Oauth standard as well as traditional Telco/enterprise authentication mechanisms, according to Oracle. It also prevents overload of the edge and back-end infrastructure and denial of service attacks while prioritizing traffic to maintain normal service to valid users, and efficiently handles encryption keys and network authentication.

WebRTC is supposed to be simple. With the Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller, this simplicity extends to developers as well as the end-user.

Oracle’s Senior Director, Service Delivery Solutions, James Steadman, will deliver a keynote speech on Thurs., June 19 at 11:45 a.m. at this week’s WebRTC IV Conference & Expo happening in Atlanta.  

(source: http://www.webrtc-solutions.com/topics/webrtc-solutions/articles/381502-oracle-makes-webrtc-easier-the-backend.htm)