Tags Tag archive: 'ICE'

November 17, 2016

ICE connected or not…

Contributed by Nils Ohlmeier, Hacking on real time communications since 2002

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In Firefox 49 we released support for ICE Consent Freshness as a first way to detect that an ICE transport is no longer working. What does ICE Consent Refresh do, you ask?

With plain ICE

Lets start with what we had before. Without Consent Refresh the ICE standard requires us to send so called Keepalives to keep the ports in the NAT open. But these Keepalives had a couple of issues. First of all the Keepalives only send traffic. They do not require a response nor do they expect any response. So as the sender, you basically try your best to keep the NAT ports open, but you have no idea if it works or not.

Adding Consent timeouts

To improve that experience, in Firefox 49 we released support for ICE Consent Freshness. With (more…)

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September 26, 2016

Just Begin Again (ICE Restart)

Contributed by Michael Froman, crossing IP communication streams since 2005

Where do we, well, start? First a quick word about ICE itself. ICE stands for Interactive Connectivity Establishment, and, at its root, is how your browser discovers exactly how to connect to other computers through a NAT for WebRTC calls. ICE restart becomes necessary when network conditions change such as when transitioning from WiFi to a cellular network, or between two different WiFi networks.

OK. I hear you asking, “How does this affect me?” Or maybe more likely, “I think this is affecting me! How can I tell?”. I’m glad you asked. (more…)

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