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Server Design

🌎 Backend Components:​

Server API:​

  • The Server API acts as the entry point for managing meetings. When a host user creates a room, they interact with the Server API, which handles room metadata generation.
  • Upon room creation, the host establishes a WebRTC connection to share their media streams (video, audio, or screen sharing). The Server API manages room tasks and interacts with databases to ensure smooth room creation and maintenance.

Server WebSocket (WS):​

  • The Server WebSocket component focuses on real-time communication. It manages WebSocket and WebRTC signaling, facilitating control message exchange between clients and servers.
  • When a new user joins a room, the Server WS notifies all clients, triggering them to create new peer connections for receiving the new user's media streams. This keeps all participants synchronized during meetings.

👷 Client-Side Workflow:​

Room Creation:​

  • Host users initiate meeting room creation by interacting with the Server API. Upon successful creation, they receive metadata detailing the room configuration.
  • Subsequently, hosts establish WebRTC connections to start sharing their media streams.

Participant Joining:​

  • When a new user joins the room, the Server WS notifies all existing participants. Each participant creates a new peer connection to accommodate the incoming user.
  • This peer-to-peer setup enables efficient media stream exchange, ensuring smooth real-time collaboration.

Media Transmission:​

  • Once all participants have established connections, they can seamlessly publish and subscribe to media streams.
  • Users engage in video conferencing by transmitting and receiving audio, video, or screen-sharing data over the WebRTC connections.

🛠️ Architecture Design​

  • Waterbus prioritizes scalability and high availability. To achieve this:
    • Server API and Server WS are designed for scalability using Kubernetes (k8s).
    • Server API scalability is supported by a Load Balancer, while Server WS scalability relies on Redis as a Message Broker to scale the WebSocket server.
    • Redis also acts as a Message Broker for handling scale-out and scale-in events. As users in a room do not connect to a single Server WS, the server redirects them to their partner's location.

🧰 Entity Relationship Diagram​

  • The entity relationship diagram (ERD) illustrates Waterbus' structure:
    • Meeting represents a chat and video call room.
    • Participant refers to a user actively joining the call room, while Member denotes a user in a room who doesn't need a room password to join the call.

🚀 SFU Architecture​

  • In the SFU architecture above, each user connects to a single SFU node. When user A requests to subscribe to B's media and C's media, A's node sends a redirect request to the target nodes. User A connects with Nodes B & C.
  • When a node shuts down (scale-in), it emits to users that it is being shut down, and users silently reconnect to another node.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further clarification!