I know many of you have a bunch of questions similar to the ones shown below.
Let’s get them quickly answered first! (Click on the questions to expand for the answer.)
Data channel can deliver any types of data. If you wish, you send send audio or video
data over the data channel too, but if you need to playback the media in real-time,
using media channels (See Media Communication) that uses RTP/RTCP protocols are the better options.
Applicability of the data channel is unlimited! The data channel solves packet loss,
congestion problems and many other stuff for you and provide you with very simple
API to deliver you your data to your peer in real-time. You just need to focus on what
your application wants to achieve, and be creative.
Here are some example applications using the data channel:
Real-time network games
Serverless home automation from remote
Text chat
Animation (series of still images)
P2P CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Monitoring data from IoT
Continuous ingestion of time-series data from sensor devices
This layer is responsible for the data channel handshake with the peer. It uses a
SCTP stream as a control channel to negotiate capabilities such as ordered delivery,
maxRetransmits/maxPacketLifeTime (a.k.a. “Partial-reliability”), etc.