Behaviour of WebRTC in Non-optimal Networks

Sammanfattning: The behaviour of WebRTC when the real-time communication with audio is done over a non-optimal network is investigated in this thesis. Different methods for collecting and analyzing data from an online survey are considered. A test environment was developed from which two online surveys would be conducted, where the outgoing packets had various interferences applied to them by the server. This was made in order to be able to simulate a non-optimal network e g WiFi. The participants are told to listen to various audio sequences and are asked to rate the quality as they perceive it. Although considered, video was not used in the surveys, as it would have increased the complexity of the surveys and increasing the risk of having the participants rejecting the surveys. Two independent surveys were conducted. The first survey utilized WebRTC for sending the audio, this was compared to the second survey which instead used Icecast. The result showed that WebRTC behaves well when there was only one type of interference added. Compared to Icecast it had lower performance. However, this could be contributed to the fact that two independent groups were used and the surveys had low participation rates. The surveys proved the feasibility of conducting online surveys for measuring perceived quality, although the participation rate was extremely low (2.8%), something that has to be considered when performing online surveys.