3.8.2. Parallel Forking

3.8.2. Parallel Forking

Parallel forking involves a call being dispatched to multiple remote callees, where each callee can accept the call and multiple simultaneous active signaling sessions can be established as a result. If multiple callees send media at the same time, the possibilities for handling this are described in [RFC3960], Section 3.1. Most SIP devices today only support exchanging media with a single device at a time and do not try to mix multiple early media audio sources, as that could result in a confusing situation. For example, consider having a European ringback tone mixed together with the North American ringback tone -- the resulting sound would not be like either tone and would confuse the user. If the signaling application wishes to only exchange media with one of the remote endpoints at a time, then from a media engine point of view, this is exactly like the sequential forking case.

In the parallel forking case where the JavaScript application wishes to simultaneously exchange media with multiple peers, the flow is slightly more complex, but the JavaScript application can follow the strategy that [RFC3960] describes, using UPDATE. The UPDATE approach allows the signaling to set up a separate media flow for each peer that it wishes to exchange media with. In JSEP, this offer used in the UPDATE would be formed by simply creating a new PeerConnection (see Section 4.1) and making sure that the same local media streams have been added into this new PeerConnection. Then the new PeerConnection object would produce an SDP offer that could be used by the signaling to perform the UPDATE strategy discussed in [RFC3960].

As a result of sharing the media streams, the application will end up with N parallel PeerConnection sessions, each with a local and remote description and their own local and remote addresses. The media flow from these sessions can be managed using setDirection (see Section 4.2.3), or the application can choose to play out the media from all sessions mixed together. Of course, if the application wants to only keep a single session, it can simply terminate the sessions that it no longer needs.