Mesh

Mesh is an architecture for multipoint where every participant sends and receives its media to all other participants.

A mesh is a very common technique that is used in WebRTC to build multipoint conferences. It can usually scale to 4-6 participants for video sessions at most.

Advantages of mesh architecture

  • Simple to implement in WebRTC
  • Requires very little backend infrastructure, keeping the resulting service cheap to operate

Disadvantages of mesh architecture

  • Can't scale to a large number of participants
  • Requires a lot of uplink bandwidth from the participants

Other multipoint architectures are routing and mixing.

Additional reading

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Independent WebRTC analyst. 20+ years in telecom, 13 focused on WebRTC. Writes for developers and product teams who need to understand, not just implement, real-time communications.