[pntaw] TURN over websockets or just TURN.

["Hutton, Andrew" <[e-mail]>]

Some thoughts on comparing the TURN over Websockets approach in draft-chenxin-behave-turn-websocket and the HTTP Connect (Without websocket) approach discussed in draft-hutton-rtcweb-nat-firewall-considerations.

Please note that my motivation is simply to find a good solution to deploying WebRTC in the presence of web proxies / firewalls and I am not tied to any particular solution.

In the presence of an explicit proxy the websockets approach is to use HTTP CONNECT to traverse the proxy (RFC 6455) so the question is whether there are any advantages or disadvantages to wrapping TURN with the websockets layer as this cannot be about the use of HTTP CONNECT which is used by in both solutions.

Websockets adds some overhead as there is an extra handshake that takes place with the server and there is some extra overhead in the data encapsulation.

The purpose of the extra HTTP handshake to upgrade to HTTP to a websockets connection is to allow an HTTP Server to use the same port for both HTTP and the websockets protocol.  However I don't think this is necessary for WebRTC media connections as it is very unlikely that a web server will want to handle WebRTC media/TURN at all never mind on the HTTP port as the media.

So does encapsulating the TURN data in websocket frames provide any benefit. I can imagine that there might be some scenarios in which using a websockets connection might work when TURN might not simply because the media is buried in further layers of encapsulation. However I don't know if this is really the case and also we are of course not trying to hide the fact that this is media. 

The extra websockets overhead for all the media packets is surely a drawback of this approach.

Not encapsulating the TURN in websockets would also probably provide better control for those wanting to assert policies on the handling of media.

Therefore as you can see I don't see the benefit of encapsulating TURN in websockets but I look forward to hearing other opinions and maybe I have missed something important.

Regards
Andy