Chapter 8. WebRTC and Rich Communication Services

Two decades ago, when mobile phones had just begun to become vital for everyone, the telecom service providers were using only basic call services to generate revenue. In a few years from then, the masses became used to the old voice calls, and the need for more service over mobile was stirred up. Then began the era of Short Message Service (SMS) followed by Multimedia Message Service (MMS), which involved interaction with text and multimedia files. The wheel of innovation again spun in a few years. This time it led to the merging of the existing telecom services with the IP world as well as convergence between desktop computers and mobile devices as communication end points. This resulted in enhanced services such as video calls; live streaming; and syncing of messages, logs, and contacts between different call agents registered with a user. However, this also led to some issues such as handling multiple clients, services, identities,...