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Overview

Daily’s Mesh SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit) is a network architecture in which our globally distributed media servers are used to reduce the impact of the public internet and isolate it to the end user’s local ISP. In many cases, this reduces the latency, packet loss, and jitter — improving the overall call experience for end users around the globe. Some of our competitors call this architecture Cascaded Media Servers.

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How does Daily’s Mesh SFU work?

It’s best to start with an example — if a user in California has a video call with a user from New York, the traditional approach would be for both of them to connect to a centralized media server (an SFU). This central media server can be equidistant to both users, or close to one user and far from the other. In either case, the connection between the end user and the SFU is on the public internet and, therefore, subject to disruption and unpredictability of the public internet. Traditional Network Topology This is remedied by the Mesh SFU topology, in which the end user is directly communicating with their nearest SFU, and those SFUs communicate with each other over our provider’s internal backhaul network, avoiding as much exposure to the public internet as possible. Our data shows that the backhaul connection within a cloud infrastructure is far more performant compared to the connections between the ISPs. Mesh SFU Topology

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AWS Infrastructure

Our Mesh SFU topology is built on AWS infrastructure, which has 400+ POPs (points of presence) between 26 regions around the world. As AWS continues to expand its availability zones and POPs across the globe, Daily’s own capacity and performance also scale alongside it. The AWS 50th-percentile ping benchmarks below demonstrate very low latencies between AWS regions within both the EU and US. End user latencies would be even lower than these averages, since user <-> SFU distance is generally smaller than SFU <-> SFU distance.
EU FrankfurtEU StockholmEU MilanEU IrelandEU LondonEU Paris
EU Frankfurt32312261712
EU Stockholm22332423331
EU Milan12322352620
EU Ireland27433521319
EU London18342713411
EU Paris13322119114
Average20ms
US VirginiaUS OhioUS CaliforniaUS Oregon
US Virginia5146368
US Ohio1445355
US California6252422
US Oregon6854222
Average35ms

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Further reading

Deep dive: How Daily's Global Mesh Network works

A detailed look at the architecture behind Daily’s mesh SFU infrastructure — how media routing, region selection, and backbone networking work under the hood.