Design a Video Conferencing Platform (Zoom / Google Meet)
Real-time multi-party video: WebRTC peer-to-peer limits, Selective Forwarding Units (SFU) vs MCU, UDP media transport, and audio mixing.
01.1. Functional & Non-Functional Requirements
A Real-Time Video Conferencing Platform (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams) enables low-latency multi-party video/audio calls, screen sharing, real-time chat, and meeting recordings across global participants.
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Party Video & Audio Calls: Support group video meetings with up to
1,000 interactive participants(and thousands in webinar view-only mode). - Dynamic Speaker Switching: Automatically detect the active speaker and promote their video stream to high resolution (
1080p) while displaying others in grid thumbnails (180p-360p). - Screen Sharing & Audio Mixing: Support high-frame-rate screen sharing and clear audio packet mixing with noise suppression.
- Meeting Recording: Record meetings server-side and save to cloud object storage (S3).
Non-Functional Requirements
- Ultra-Low Real-Time Latency: End-to-end glass-to-glass audio/video latency must remain
< 150 msglobally for natural interactive conversations. - Packet Loss & Jitter Resilience: Gracefully tolerate up to
20-30\%packet loss and jitter without call drops. - Client Bandwidth Efficiency: Bounded client upstream bandwidth (
< 2.5 Mbpsper participant regardless of meeting room size).
Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) Real-Time Media Routing Architecture 🎥
Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) Real-Time Media Routing Architecture 🎥
Participants upload 1 simulcast stream to cloud SFUs; the SFU routes full-resolution video of the active speaker and low-bitrate thumbnails over UDP/SRTP without CPU-intensive re-encoding.
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