Over recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing has seen a rapid rise in popularity. Many conferencing systems are available, including Zoom, Cisco Webex, Discord, Jitsi Meet, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. Video conferencing providers need large infrastructure, and compared to other web applications, have increased bandwidth and latency requirements.
Video conferencing providers implement special network topologies to reduce latency between participants and to stream to large audiences. Besides media streaming, conferencing systems also support other features, such as a text chat. These may be implemented separately from media streaming and require only near-real-time communication. We aim to investigate how commercial conferencing providers structure their systems to deal with these requirements and how they differ from open-source options such as Jitsi Meet.
Your tasks for this thesis topic:
- Design an analysis method
- Investigate which protocols the systems use and what messages are exchanged.
- Investigate which providers the conferencing systems uses for hosting and how servers are geographically distributed.
- Optional: Determine the software running on the server using protocol headers, supported features, or other fingerprinting techniques
