Deep dives into ICE, STUN, TURN, and real-time infrastructure.
Sixteen hands-on articles written for engineers who ship WebRTC: start with the fundamentals series if you're new, or jump straight to debugging and operations if something is on fire.
Fundamentals
The architecture behind browser-to-browser audio, video, and data: media capture, RTCPeerConnection, the role of signaling, and the built-in encryption every connection gets for free.
How a STUN binding request reveals your public IP and port, what srflx candidates are, and when public STUN servers are enough — and when they aren't.
Relay candidates, UDP vs TCP vs TLS transports, time-limited credentials, and the bandwidth math you need before putting a TURN server into production.
Candidate gathering, connectivity checks, and pair selection: how ICE decides whether your call goes direct, through STUN, or over a relay.
Full-cone to symmetric: how NAT types differ, why symmetric NAT defeats STUN, and what CGNAT on mobile networks means for your relay budget.
SDP offers and answers, trickle ICE candidate exchange, and what a minimal WebSocket signaling server actually has to do.
Operations & Deployment
From apt install to production hardening: turnserver.conf walkthrough, TLS certificates, firewall rules, and the authentication options that matter.
DTLS and SRTP are table stakes — the real work is TURN credential hygiene, signaling authentication, and understanding what mDNS candidates do and don't protect.
Relay traffic is where WebRTC infrastructure money goes. Measure your relay ratio, pick the right hosting, tune coturn quotas, and run the build-vs-buy math.
The bandwidth math for each topology, where simulcast and SVC fit, and a decision framework for rooms from two participants to two hundred.
Debugging & Compatibility
A triage workflow for dead connections: webrtc-internals, reading ICE candidates, getStats(), and command-line checks for your STUN/TURN ports.
Symptom, cause, fix — for ICE failures, getUserMedia rejections, missing relay candidates, SDP glare, and DTLS handshake problems.
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge compared: codec availability, API gaps, mobile quirks, and feature detection that won't break next release.
Media & Advanced Topics
Compression efficiency vs CPU vs hardware support: how to choose codecs per use case and control the choice with setCodecPreferences().
SCTP under the hood, reliable vs unreliable delivery modes, backpressure with bufferedAmount, and a working chunked file-transfer pattern.
Native SDKs vs mobile web, hardware codecs and battery budgets, CallKit and ConnectionService, and why mobile networks need TURN more often.