Peer-to-peer between browsers: cyclon protocol over WebRTC

The web application paradigm has become a dominant choice due to the ubiquity of web browsers across PCs and mobile devices, and the layer of abstraction that they provide. However, browsers have traditionally communicated only with servers, never from one browser to another. The WebRTC API overcomes this limitation, providing further avenues for the web application paradigm to evolve. In this paper we present Cyclon.p2p an implementation of the Cyclon peer sampling protocol using the WebRTC API. We provide a detailed overview of our system, and conduct a thorough evaluation of the implementation in real-world and simulated experiments. Our results strongly suggest that our implementation is feasible for large scale deployment in real world Web applications.