About

I’m Giacomo Vacca. I work on real-time communications over the Internet: WebRTC, SIP/SDP, NAT traversal (ICE/STUN/TURN), RTP/media pipelines, and the tooling needed to debug them in production.

This blog is a place where I write down things I’ve learned while building and troubleshooting RTC systems: practical explanations, packet-level investigations, and small notes that I want to be able to find later.

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Topics

What you will find

WebRTC connectivity and NAT traversal (ICE/TURN)

SIP/SDP behavior and negotiation details

RTP/media analysis from PCAPs, codecs, and trace dissection

Occasional off-topic posts about running

Contact

If you want to reach me, the simplest way is via the comments, or through:

- giavac at X

- Linkedin

- github

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed on this site are solely my own and do not represent those of any current or past employer, client, company, or individual.

All content is provided for informational purposes only. Any code snippets, configuration examples, or references to software products are provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind. You are responsible for evaluating and testing anything before using it in your own systems.

You are welcome to share and reuse this content provided that you include a clear link back to the original post.

Comments are welcome. Please keep them respectful and on-topic. I may moderate or remove spam, abusive content, or anything that is clearly unrelated.

Troubleshooting TURN

WebRTC applications use the ICE negotiation to discovery the best way to communicate with a remote party. I t dynamically finds a pair of candidates (IP address, port and transport, also known as “transport address”) suitable for exchanging media and data. The most important aspect of this is “dynamically”: a local and a remote transport address are found based on the network conditions at the time of establishing a session. For example, a WebRTC client that normally uses a server reflexive transport address to communicate with an SFU. when running inside the home office, may use a relay transport address over TCP when running inside an office network which limits remote UDP targets. The same configuration (defined as “iceServers” when creating an RTCPeerConnection will work in both cases, producing different outcomes.

Extracting RTP streams from network captures

I needed an efficient way to programmatically extract RTP streams from a network capture. In addition I wanted to: save each stream into a separate pcap file. extract SRTP-negotiated keys if present and available in the trace, associating them to the related RTP (or SRTP if the negotiation succeeded) stream. Some caveats: In normal conditions the negotiation of SRTP sessions happens via a secure transport, typically SIP over TLS, so the exchanged crypto information may not be available from a simple network capture. There are ways to extract RTP streams using Wireshark or tcpdump; it’s not necessary to do it programmatically. All this said I wrote a small tool ( https://github.com/giavac/pcap_tool ) that parses a network capture and tries to interpret each packet as either RTP/SRTP or SIP, and does two main things: save each detected RTP/SRTP stream into a dedicated pcap file, which name contains the related SSRC. print a summary of the crypto information exchanged, if available. With ...

Testing SIP platforms and pjsip

There are various levels of testing, from unit to component, from integration to end-to-end, not to mention performance testing and fuzzing. When developing or maintaining Real Time Communications (RTC or VoIP) systems, all these levels (with the exclusion maybe of unit testing) are made easier by applications explicitly designed for this, like sipp . sipp has a deep focus on performance testing, or using a simpler term, load testing. Some of its features allow to fine tune properties like call rate, call duration, simulate packet loss, ramp up traffic, etc. In practical terms though once you have the flexibility to generate SIP signalling to negotiate sessions and RTP streams, you can use sipp for functional testing too. sipp can act as an entity generating a call, or receiving a call, which makes it suitable to surround the system under test and simulate its interactions with the real world. What sipp does can be generalised: we want to be able to simulate the real world tha...

Giacomo Vacca

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