5. Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC)

It is plausible that the dominant near-to-medium-term WebRTC usage model will be people using the interactive audio and video capabilities to communicate with each other via web browsers running on a notebook computer that has a built-in microphone and speakers.

WebRTC endpoints SHOULD include an AEC or some other form of echo control. On general-purpose platforms (e.g., a PC), it is common for the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for audio capture and the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for audio playback to use different clocks. Endpoint AECs SHOULD be robust to such conditions, unless they are shipped along with hardware that guarantees capture and playback to be sampled from the same clock.

Endpoints SHOULD allow the entire AEC and/or the nonlinear processing (NLP) to be turned off for applications, such as music, that do not behave well with the spectral attenuation methods typically used in NLP. Similarly, endpoints SHOULD have the ability to detect the presence of a headset and disable echo cancellation.

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