[SahAssar]

> Obviously, one would want the data channel (last option). There's some work done in this area. However, it's still not full featured.

How would that even work? You need signaling to set up the data channel, so how could you handle signaling over a channel that isn't set up?

[littlestymaar]

In a 1 to 1 setting, it obviously doesn't work. But in a mesh setting with n connected peers, when you want to add a new peer, you can perform the first signaling step via a server to connect with one member of the mesh, and then do all the subsequent signaling through this peer. This way, to set-up a mesh with n users you only need n-1 signaling messages processes by your server (down from n(n-1)/2 if you perform everything through a centralized signaling server).

In practice, I know nobody who does that though. I don't think the extra complexity is worth it if your mesh are never really big, and with WebRTC, you rarely encounter situations where you have more than a few peers in the same mesh (Google Chrome even used to struggle a lot if you had more than a few dataChannel opened on the same page, while Firefox handled hundreds of connexions without issue).

[SahAssar]

Ah, yeah, I was thinking of the initial connection.

I guess the mesh needs to be pretty small so that you can have a fully connected mesh or you'd need some way to deal with netsplits and a gossip-style protocol for discovery of new nodes, right?