On the Seamless Interaction between WebRTC Browsers and SIP-Based Conferencing Systems

The growing interest in integrating interactive multimedia features into web applications has recently led to the creation of the W3C WebRTC and the IETF RTCWEB working groups. Such groups are jointly defining both the application programming interfaces and the underlying communication protocols for the setup and management of a reliable communication path between any pair of next-generation web browsers. While the ongoing work is focusing on peer-to-peer communication between browsers, engineers are also facing a new issue, associated with the coexistence of legacy SIP-based systems with the upcoming browser-enabled architectures. We herein discuss how we tackled such an issue, by first identifying interoperability requirements and then presenting a real-world interoperability example dealing with the integration of RTCWEB clients into an existing standards-based collaboration platform.