Routing is an architecture for multipoint where every participant sends its media to a central server and receives the streams from all participants via that central server.

The routing mechanism enables the WebRTC clients to reduce the load necessary from them on the uplink by having a server “spread” their media to all other participants.

The routing mechanism also reduces the load from the server by not requiring it to decode, layout and re-encode the media sent to all the participants.

At times, routing will use Simulcast to provide the most suitable resolution and bitrate to each participant.

This makes the cost of a routing architecture feasible for many use cases.

Advantages of routing architecture

• Requires asymmetric bandwidth (more downlink than uplink) from the participants, making it very suitable for ADSL
• Scales to 10 and more participants with ease for many use cases and screen layouts

Disadvantages of routing architecture

• Requires backend routing server, though less expensive than a mixing solution
• Can be tricky to implement

Other multipoint architectures are mesh and mixing.