2017 - A Big Year for Product Development

It’s been a busy year for product development at LiveSwitch Inc.. We released a brand new WebRTC server suite in June - LiveSwitch Server - which has had six incremental versions since it’s birth, and our WebRTC Client SDKs have had over two-dozen releases since January of this year.

With a new release series about to be announced in early Q1 (LiveSwitch 1.1 and IceLink 3.2), and with some very exciting announcements coming up in the new year, we thought we’d bring you up to speed on the latest and greatest in our product line-up, and loop you in on what we’ve been up to this year.

Client SDK Upgrades

2017 has seen vast performance improvements of our Client SDK on every platform. Our Xamarin port is near-par in performance with the native platforms ports - which is exceptional considering how Mono's garbage collector blocks during it's memory cleanup. We've opted to build a cross-platform DataBuffer (byte) pool to work-around this and it improved performance on almost every platform.

With these performance improvements, our product team has been able to focus on broadening the scope of our platform coverage. We not only saw two major web browsers enter the WebRTC space this year, but IoT, wearables, and AR/VR spaces have also been growing at a steady pace.

In 2017, our Client SDK has been used on Raspberry Pis, custom medical devices, and various flavours of wearables to process real-time medical metrics, game vectors, sentiment analytics, and more.

With dataBuffer pooling, countless other performance enhancements, and increased platform coverage, we’ve seen the follow results:

• Reduced connection times by up to 90%
• Doubled the number of platforms supported
• Reduced packet recovery overhead by up to 500%
• Added support for 4 new web browsers

LiveSwitch Interop Success

As we review LiveSwitch load test results from our customers' various use-cases, and with the help of our friends at TestRTC, we're seeing some very interesting scenarios. The fact that LiveSwitch is not only a WebRTC server suite, but it can also interop with any SIP trunk, brings unique challenges to our R&D department.

Not all legacy systems are designed exactly to spec. We’ve encountered bugs in SIP signalling, firewall issues, and ICE handshakes that never end. The fact that our Professional Services team has successfully deployed LiveSwitch in several SIP projects, speaks to the architectural flexibility that our server suite and Client SDK have to offer. Some of the systems LiveSwitch connected with in 2017 were Asterisk, FreeSwitch, FlowRoute, ZipDX, and TurboBridge.

LiveSwitch, Powered by WebSync too

As you probably know, the LiveSwitch WebRTC server suite is a P2P, MCU, SFU hybrid solution with SIP connectors and server-side recording capabilities that are powered by the IceLink 3 stack. Did you also know that when designing LiveSwitch, we took WebSync 4, wrapped it with a new promise-based API, and beefed up it’s clustering capabilities? The LiveSwitch Gateway can be backed by a Redis memory provider, allowing it to scale at a level that far surpasses its predecessor.

The LiveSwitch media and client stacks are powered by the IceLink 3 series, but, like WebSync, IceLink is also wrapped with an even simpler API in the LiveSwitch Client SDK. Because LiveSwitch controls both the client and server, the already rich syntactic sugar of IceLink 3 can be made even simpler, while still allowing developers the flexibility that makes IceLink so powerful, setting it apart from other WebRTC SDKs.

2017 resulted in significant growth and maturity to our products, but 2018 has even more exciting features, platforms, and scalability announcements coming.

If you’re curious about the possibilities or have an interesting use-case you’d like to discuss, feel free to open a discussion on our support forum to start a conversation with our community of real-time communications experts.

Until next time, keep one eye open for our next blog post, and, as always, happy coding!