WebRTC Overhead

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

I want to know, how much overhead WebRTC produces when sending data over datachannels. I know that Websockets have 2 - 14 Bytes overhead for each frame. Does WebRTC use more Overhead? I cannot find some useful information on the web. Its clear for me, that Datachannels can not be used for now. How much overhead is used with Mediastreams?

manpreet 3 years ago

WebRTC uses RTP to send its media. RTP runs over UDP.

Besides the usual IP and UDP headers, there are two additional headers:

1. The RTP header itself starts from 12 bytes and can grow from there, depending on what gets used.
2. The payload header - the header that is used for each data packet of the specific codec being used. This one depends on the codec itself.

RTP is designed to have as little overhead as possible over its payload due to the basic reasoning that you want to achieve better media quality, which means dedicating as many bits as possible to the media itself.