WebRTC, TURN and Geolocation. How to Pick the Best Server to Work With?

Different ways to do the same thing.

One of the biggest problems is choice. We don’t like having choice. Really. The less options you have in front of you the easier it is to choose. The more options we have – the less inclined we are to make a decision. It might be this thing called FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out, or the fact that we don’t want to make a decision without having the whole information – something that is impossible to achieve anyway, or it might be just the fear of committing to something – commitment means owning the decision and its ramifications.

WebRTC comes with a huge set of options to select from if you are a developer. Heck – even as a user of this technology I can no longer say what service I am using:

• I use Intermedia AnyMeeting for my course office hours and workshops
• Google Meet for testRTC meetings with customers
• Whatever a customer wants for my own consultation meetings, which varies between Hangouts, Skype, appear.in, talky, GoToMeeting, WebEx, … or the customer’s own service

In my online course, there’s a lesson discussing NAT traversal. One of the things I share there is the need to place the TURN server in WebRTC as close as possible to the edge – to the user with his WebRTC client. Last week, in one of my Office Hour sessions, a question was raised – how do you make that decision. And the answer isn’t clear cut. There are… a few options.

My guess is that in most cases, the idea or thought of taking a problem and scaling it out seems daunting. Taking that same scale out problem and spreading it across the globe to offer lower latency and geolocation support might seem paralyzing. At the end of the day, though it isn’t that complex to get a decent solution going.

The idea is you’ve got a user that runs on a browser or a mobile device. He is trying to reach out to your infrastructure (to another person probably, but still – through your infrastructure). And since your infrastructure is spread all over the globe, you want him to get the closest box to him.

How do we know what’s closest? Here are two ways I’ve seen this go down with WebRTC based services:

Via DNS

When your browser tries to reach out the server – be it the STUN or TURN server, the signaling server, or whatever – he ends up using DNS in most cases (you better use DNS than an IP address for these things in production – you are aware of it – right?).

Since the DNS knows where the request originated, it can make an informed decision as to which IP address to give back to the browser. That informed decision is done in the infrastructure side but by the DNS itself.

One of the popular services for it is AWS Route 53. From their website:

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow makes it easy for you to manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, and Weighted Round Robin.

This means you can put a policy in place so that the Route 53 DNS will simply route the incoming request to a server based on its location (Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS) or based on load balancing (Weighted Round Robin).

appear.in, for example, is making use of route53.

Amazon Route 53 isn’t the only such service – there are others out there, and depending on the cloud provider you use and your needs, you may end up using something else.

Via Geo IP

Another option is to use a Geo IP type of a service. You give your public IP address – and get your location in return.

You can use this link for exampleto check out where you are. Here’s what I get:

A few things that immediately show up here:

• Yes. I live in Israel
• Yes. My ISP is Bezeq
• Not really… Tel-Aviv isn’t a state. It is just a city
• And I don’t live in Bat Yam. I live in Kiryat Ono – a 20km drive

That said, this is pretty close!

Now, this is a link, but you can also get this kind of a thing programmatically and there are vendors who offer just that. I’ve head the pleasure to use MaxMind’s GeoIP. It comes in two flavors:

1. As a service – you shoot them an API and get geo IP related information, priced per query
2. As a database – you download their database and query it locally

There’s a kind of a confidence level to such a service, as the reply you get might not be accurate at all. We had a customer complaining at testRTC servers which jinxed his geolocation feature and added latency. His geo IP service thought the machine was in Europe while in truth it was located in the US.

The interesting thing is, that different such services will give you different responses. Here’s where I am located base (see here):

As you can see, there’s a real debate as to my exact whereabouts. They all feel I live in Israel, but the city thing is rather spread – and none of them is exact in my case.

So.

There are many Geo IP services. They will differ in the results they give. And they are best used if you need an application level geolocation solution and a DNS one can’t be used directly.

Telemetry

When inside an app, or even from a browser when you ask permission, you can get better location information.

A mobile device has a GPS, so it will know the position of the device better than anything else most of the time. The browser can do something similar.

The problem with this type of location is that you need permission to use it, and asking for more permissions from the user means adding friction – decide if this is what you want to do or not.

Don’t use WebRTC iceServers to geolocate your users

I’ve seen those who use the Peer Connection configuration to pass multiple TURN servers in the iceSevers parameter, thinking that WebRTC will do a good job and figuring out which TURN server (and by extension which region) is best for a session to use.

On paper this might work. In practice – it doesn’t, and for multiple reasons:

• Some browsers simply dislike a lot of servers in the iceServers list. They’ll even warn about it
• The longer the list, the more ICE candidates you will have. The more ICE candidates, the more candidate pairs to test. The more pairs to test, the more messages you will have flying around at the beginning of a call. Not a good thing
• WebRTC will tend to try and figure out which connection is best to which TURN server. In turn, it may oscillate between TURN servers throughout the session which leads to poor media quality – exactly what you’re trying to avoid

What’s next?

I am sure the DNS option is similar in its accuracy level to the geo IP ones, though it might be a bit more up to date, or have some learning algorithm to handle latency based routing. At the end of the day, you should use one of these options and it doesn’t really matters which.

Assume that the solution you end up with isn’t bulletproof – it will work most of the times, but sometimes it may fail – in which case, latency will suffer a bit. Oh, and if in doubt, just pick up a managed WebRTC TURN service instead…