Building a Global RTC Service — Part 2: Overcoming RTC Challenges
As we point out in part one of this series, service providers and applications are increasingly using real-time communications (RTC) to enable live interactive video transmissions.
Keep reading to learn some common technical challenges facing RTC service providers and applications — and how you can easily overcome them using Zenlayer’s global RTC infrastructure.
5 Challenges for RTC Service Providers and Applications
1. Integrating network resources
Integrating and expanding network resources takes time and effort. This becomes even more challenging when resources come from multiple manufacturers.
2. Public network optimization limitations
While protocol optimization can improve poor network environments, this requires significant technical investments and research. Protocol optimization cannot completely solve problems related to reliability, latency, and jitter. It also depends on the local ISP’s IP transit service quality.
3. Remaining competitive
In order to compete in today’s crowded digital market, service providers and application developers need to operate with great efficiency. Maintaining a competitive advantage in global routing and scheduling, protocol optimization, and network transmission quality can be a challenge.
4. Lack of network reliability
All apps involved in RTC scenarios require reliable and optimized networks. The demand for network reliability is very high, and any amount of network downtime is unacceptable. However, this is very difficult to achieve in areas with underdeveloped internet infrastructure.
5. Limited knowledge of global infrastructure
Service providers and RTC application developers often lack experience in building global infrastructure, especially in areas such as data centers, carriers, and public cloud connections. For this reason, their decisions might not factor in actual operational and performance data.
How Zenlayer enables RTC
Zenlayer can help businesses overcome all of the above-mentioned challenges. That’s because Zenlayer offers an industry leading RTC infrastructure solution that utilizes the company’s massively distributed edge nodes, acceleration capabilities, and private and dedicated network backbone.
With Zenlayer, companies can expand seamlessly — achieving global coverage, enhancing network reliability, improving operational efficiency, and gaining more flexibility for RTC infrastructure building scenarios. Zenlayer provides dedicated RTC service resources and network services to enhance user experience.
Here are some of the ways that RTC service providers and applications can from Zenlayer:
· Highly reliable network assurance: Zenlayer offers a variety of services global intelligent scheduling, route selection, fast route switching, and multidimensional transmission quality indicator analysis. These services can help ensure network reliability.
· Read-to-use network capabilities: Zenlayer integrates with RTC platforms through protocol compatibility, API connections, and service-level cooperation. Businesses benefit from a reliable acceleration network based on global dedicated lines for seamless communication with RTC platforms and easier expansion.
· Targeted construction recommendations: Targeted guidance and data to help make informed decisions about infrastructure design and construction in global RTC deployments.
· New access-side optimization options: This works by combining an anycast routing component with network optimization to reduce latency and improve reliability.
· Disaster recovery plan for RTC: A complete, instantly delivered disaster recovery plan outside the RTC platform.
· Global media server deployment: Deploy global computing resources and quickly enable edge media servers, mixed transcoding servers, and CDN servers according to business architecture requirements. This also enables fast, dedicated networking through zenConsole.
How Zenlayer’s RTC solution works
The Zenlayer RTC infrastructure solution consists of two parts including a Hyperconnected Real-time Network (RTN) and RTC Media Globalization.
1. Hyperconnected RTN solution
The Hyperconnected RTN solution enables full-link empowerment of the RTN network. It supports intelligent scheduling of transmission networks, access network optimization, media server networking, CDN transcoding and streaming, and high-speed and reliable cross-regional connections.
· Intelligent scheduling interface: Customers can gain immediate access to efficient collaborative scheduling capabilities. This includes global network intelligent scheduling to ensure optimal business routing, intelligent multidimensional transmission quality metric analysis, and interface docking with customer and vendor RTC platforms, giving them instant access to global acceleration capabilities.
· Network optimization: This minimizes poor user experience in weak network environments. Using anycast access, Zenlayer can divert user-side access traffic to avoid a range of issues such as instability, unreliability, and unpredictable latency that may occur during public network transmissions. Additionally, the network optimization chain is strengthened with the support of strategies at the transport protocol level.
· Cross-regional network acceleration: In order to ensure the best global network experience, customers get access to Zenlayer’s 280+ PoP nodes covering 110+ cities, 50+ Tbps network capacity, 800+ ISP partner vendors, and a IP transit network that reaches over 85% of the world’s internet users in <25 milliseconds.
2. RTC Media Server Globalization solution
This solution uses Zenlayer’s global compute resources to provide convenient delivery of RTC global media servers. Mixing and transcoding servers, edge media servers, and CDN servers can be selected and quickly networked in the console depending on the business’s architectural requirements.
· Access multiple configurations: Multiple configuration types of bare metal and VM servers are available based on different architecture requirements. They can act as edge media servers, mixing and transcoding servers, and CDN servers, and can be quickly delivered through the console or API.
· Simplify media server networking: Media server networking is made easy, facilitating rapid construction of various types of media network architectures. Support is provided for the quick construction of two-layer or three-layer networks between media server nodes in different regions, with computational and network resources being unified for activation and management. This eliminates the need for complex processes such as deploying dedicated lines or renting circuits.
· Access BGP resources: High quality BGP bandwidth resources are available globally, with efficient access capabilities and closer routing to end users.
· Server cascading and edge aggregation support: Support is provided for media server architecture design. Global real-time network performance data such as server support for the number of users and predicted latency from end users to edge servers are provided. This ensures an optimal recommendation for edge aggregation and performance assurance and gives customers data to help them make informed decisions when using edge nodes in different regions.
3. RTC Signaling Globalization solution
Zenlayer offers an RTC Signaling Globalization solution, which enables dynamic data acceleration and a smooth user experience for signaling communication scenarios like room entry, initialization, and message exchange through Zenlayer’s global accelerator service.
This solution accelerates global signaling return, signaling synchronization, and interactive messages.
How can Zenlayer support your RTC project?
Companies must overcome several challenges when deploying RTC solutions that can impact performance and stability. But with the help of an RTC enabler like Zenlayer, it’s easy to overcome many of these challenges and experience stronger results.
Do you have an RTC deployment that can benefit from Zenlayer’s global infrastructure? To schedule a consultation, contact the team today.
Jeff Ji is a Product Solutions Manager at Zenlayer. With nearly 10 years of experience in cloud and infrastructure solutions, Jeff enjoys helping clients from a wide variety of industries achieve business assurance and drive new innovations. He’s always looking for new ways to create more value for our clients and their users.
