Carlos,

A few thoughts on this one:

1. I wouldn't use Kurento. Not well maintained. Popularity is dropping. I'd use something else (mediasoup, Jitsi, Janus, …)
2. Peer Connections count is important, but in the case of 5-way calls not critical these days. There's no need to make this your main parameter for decision making
3. With an SFU, media flows to the media server which then routes it around. This means a lot less strain on the uplink, where users are more limited in available bitrate (not to mention the reduction in CPU requirements form the client)

I am implementing a multi party call app, I started with one to one video calls, and now I am using Kurento media server to achieve mutli party calls without doing a mesh architecture.

But for the examples I saw, each user needs to open a receive only peer connection per each participant to receive their stream. This means if there are 5 people in the call. There will be 1 connection for sending your media and other 4 WebRTC connections to receive the corresponding media of the other users. How is this different from a mesh architecture? Why people compare Mesh vs SFU if you still need to open connections to receive medias from each other user? The only difference is that you upload your own media once.

So how can we avoid that? According to your blog one of the solutions is Just have 1 connection to send and 1 connection to receive multiple medias? Is that part of official WEBRTC standards?

Can that still be considered SFU? Is it a new architectural approach?

Thanks in advance.

Mooman, this question is more suitable for stackoverflow or discuss-webrtc. Somewhat less in a comment on an article on this blog.

Look at https://webrtc.org/getting-started/unified-plan-transition-guide

To use a single peer connection you’ll need to implement unified plan.

Michael,

Not sure I understand your requirement or intent exactly, but if this is to have 100 browsers connect to each other without a media server, then you’re in for a huge headache – especially if you want to stream video on all of them all the time…

With mesh, you must have 2 peer connections.

If you are using a media server, then today this can be implemented as a single peer connection between each user and the media server. In most cases though, most media servers today still use multiple peer connections for this scenario as well.