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The Importance of WebRTC Testing

6 min read

November 15, 2023

With the increasing demand for remote communications and collaboration, the use of WebRTC has significantly grown and skyrocketed. From niche technology, it is mission-critical for many organisations and people worldwide. The number of video conferencing platforms leveraging WebRTC has also increased, making the competition more challenging - as such, testing your WebRTC app to ensure it ticks all the boxes has also contributed to any platform’s success.

This article will explore why WebRTC testing is crucial to video conferencing platforms and WebRTC vendors.

Table of Contents

What is a WebRTC test and WebRTC testing?
How to test WebRTC?
Tools for WebRTC testing
Types of WebRTC tests
Experience seamless real-time communication with Digital Samba

What is a WebRTC test and WebRTC testing?

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) testing involves various methodologies and tools to ensure real-time web browser communication applications function and perform seamlessly. The essence of WebRTC testing lies in validating both the functional and non-functional aspects of these applications.

Functional testing: This focuses on verifying the core functionalities, such as signalling logic, media connectivity, and user interaction, to ensure the application works as intended.
Non-functional testing: On the other hand, non-functional testing dives into aspects like performance under different network conditions, scalability to handle many users, and quality of experience delivered to the end-users.

The objective is to identify and rectify issues that may slow down the real-time communication capabilities of WebRTC applications, ensuring they deliver a reliable and high-quality user experience.

How to test WebRTC?

Device resources

In testing WebRTC applications, it's essential to consider the different devices and browsers that end-users might employ. Device resources like CPU, memory, and network capabilities can significantly impact the WebRTC application's performance.

It's advisable to test across various devices, including mobiles, tablets, desktops, and different operating systems and browsers, to ensure compatibility and optimised performance.

Server-side infrastructure

WebRTC relies on various server types, including signalling servers, media servers, and STUN/TURN servers. Ensuring these servers operate under stress and over extended periods is crucial. Conduct soak tests to understand the system's capacity, like how many calls per second your service can handle.

Identifying your infrastructure's breaking point, whether CPU utilisation or network traffic, is essential to optimise the server-side infrastructure and ensure it can handle real-world usage scenarios.

STUN vs TURN: Understanding the Differences & How They Work

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Network conditions

Network conditions are dynamic; they can fluctuate over time, affecting the WebRTC application's performance. Conduct tests to determine how quickly your media servers return to high bitrate and high frame rate operation after experiencing low bitrate or high packet loss periods.

It's also crucial to check how the media server copes with different network conditions, ensuring each user receives the necessary treatment and video streams irrespective of network variations. Ensure your WebRTC application operates well under various network conditions, especially where packet losses and bandwidth restrictions are expected.

User behaviour

Understanding user behaviour is vital in testing WebRTC applications. While automation is crucial, human behaviour with interactive WebRTC services can present unexpected scenarios, necessitating real people to test your service.

For instance, multiple users might attempt to join simultaneously in larger meetings or growing services, potentially stressing the system. Testing should validate whether the WebRTC services can handle such scenarios where many users are connecting simultaneously, ensuring a smooth user experience under varying user behaviour conditions.

Tools for WebRTC testing

WebRTC traffic generation

A fundamental aspect of WebRTC testing tools is the ability to generate WebRTC traffic, mimicking real-world application behaviour.

For instance, Digital Samba provides a Demo room that supports the signalling protocol utilised in our WebRTC setup. As such, you can simulate various network conditions and scale dynamically based on your test size, especially during stress or sizing tests.

Users simulation

Simulating user behaviour is crucial as WebRTC sessions often have asymmetric user roles. The testing tool should be capable of handling different roles in a scenario, like a lecturer-student setup or a discussion with multiple speakers. Role assignment and synchronisation mechanisms are essential for orchestrating realistic test scenarios.

Data collection

Post-traffic generation and collecting data points are critical for debugging and analysis. This includes console logs, WebRTC internal dumps, machine performance statistics, and WebRTC metrics. The comprehensiveness of data collection significantly enhances the ability to pinpoint and troubleshoot potential issues swiftly.

Analysis and visualisation of WebRTC metrics

An effective WebRTC testing tool should provide robust analysis and visualisation of WebRTC metrics, making the bug-squashing process more efficient. The ability to collect, visualise and analyse data from many users, pinpoint outliers, define failure criteria, and drill down into the details of test results is crucial for thorough testing.

Level of maintenance

With WebRTC being a rapidly evolving technology, ensuring the testing tool is well-maintained, updated, and upgraded frequently is essential. This level of maintenance is necessary to meet the changing requirements and ensure that the testing environment remains practical and relevant over time.

What is WebRTC Signalling?

Read the blog

Types of WebRTC tests

End-to-end WebRTC testing

End-to-end (E2E) testing in WebRTC assesses the entire flow of communication from the sender to the receiver under real-world conditions. This includes verifying that signalling, data transmission, and media streams function seamlessly across various network conditions and device configurations.

However, you may not find focusing on testing this layer vital if you use a CPaaS vendor like Digital Samba.

Stress testing for WebRTC

WebRTC stress testing is crucial to ensure optimal performance for the end-user. Stress testing comes in different shapes and sizes, and it is essential to figure out how many users can be crammed into a single session if your load balancer is working correctly, and how many users and sessions can fit into a single media server and TURN servers.

WebRTC group calls testing

Regarding video conferencing, most voice or video calls are often attended by more than one person and, in some cases, even 100-plus users. As such, ensuring your application can handle such numbers is vital. Group call testing evaluates the performance and scalability of WebRTC applications during multi-party sessions. It verifies the synchronisation of media streams, audio, and video quality, and the application’s ability to manage multiple users efficiently.

Live broadcast testing

When it comes to live broadcasting, there are often a few publishers and a large number of viewers. With most solutions today, the challenge is offering quality streams on the cloud. Live broadcast testing is crucial to evaluate the system’s capacity to handle high traffic loads, ensuring low latency and high-quality media transmission.

Mobile testing for WebRTC

Mobile Testing typically involves verifying the functionality and performance of a video conferencing solution on various mobile devices and operating systems. It mainly includes assessing audio/video quality, network adaptability, app functionality (can use cloud automation), and compatibility with mobile browsers to ensure seamless WebRTC integration in a diverse mobile ecosystem.

Browser testing

Currently, there are four popular browsers, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, and browser testing ensures that WebRTC applications perform consistently across different browsers and their versions. The main aim of browser testing is to ensure your WebRTC application is compatible with all browsers. It’s good practice to test on all versions and releases of each browser.

Experience seamless real-time communication with Digital Samba

In this article, we have explored WebRTC testing, how to perform WebRTC testing, and the various types of WebRTC tests that ensure a video conferencing platform offers a seamless user experience. Now, let's take a closer look at how Digital Samba leverages WebRTC testing to provide a cutting-edge live video conferencing solution.

With Digital Samba, you don’t have to worry about performing most of the tests since we have that covered. Digital Samba is compatible with various operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. It allows users to join sessions from any location using their phones, desktops, or other mobile devices, emphasising its compatibility and user-friendly nature.

Digital Samba also leverages ICE and SDP protocols to establish secure connections, traverse NATs and firewalls, and ensure stable and reliable communication during a session. We also provide seamless WebRTC group calls, a powerful technology that facilitates real-time communication through browsers without needing plugins or other software.

Last, but not least, Digital Samba utilises adaptive bitrate streaming to provide users with quality streams and compatibility across devices and operating systems.

Experience the power of Digital Samba's WebRTC-powered live video conferencing solution. Contact our sales team today to learn more and get started on enhancing your video conferencing platform.

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Experience the power of Digital Samba's WebRTC-powered live video conferencing solution

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