An On-Demand WebRTC and IoT Device Tunneling Service for Hospitals

In this paper we present the implementation of a WebRTC gateway service that can forward ad-hoc RTP data plane traffic from a browser inside a local hospital network to a browser on a local home network. The gateway leverages the same infrastructure used by the hospital to tunnel sensor and control data for medical devices in home-care deployments. In our use case, doctors at hospitals can only access port 80 through the hospital firewall on external machines, and they need to communicate with patients who are typically behind a NAT in a local WiFi network. VPN solutions only work for staff but not between patients and staff. Our solution solves this problem by redirecting all WebRTC traffic through a gateway service on the local network that has a secure tunnel established with a public gateway. The public gateway redirects traffic from multiple concurrent streams securely between local gateway services that connect to it. The local gateways also communicate with browsers on their local network to mimic a direct browser-to-browser connection without having to change the browser runtime. We have demonstrated that this technique works well within the hospital network and arbitrary patient networks, without the need for any individual host configuration. In our evaluation we show that the latency overhead is 18-20 ms for each concurrent stream added to the same gateway service, which is not discernible with a naked eye until you have more than 10 concurrent streams.