Too many ICE handovers

connectivitynetwork

A peer connection has had too many changes in the ICE candidate pairs that are being used.

Description

What we strive for is a stable ICE connection for our WebRTC session. When the ICE connection changes from one candidate pair to another multiple times, it means we have too many ICE handovers, which may indicate a real issue.

This can stem from one of these reasons:

  1. The user is moving around, switching from one preferred network to another. For example WiFi to cellular and back, or between WiFi access points on different networks
  2. There are multiple TURN servers configured generating pairs where their distance is such that may cause oscillation of the connections between ICE candidate pairs

What do we do here?

We look at all transports for the peer, and we count how many times the selected pair changes. Then we take the highest count across all transports and if more than 5 selected pairs were used, we mark this as an observation.

Notes

  • This might point to a potential bug or might indicate a network issue