Support for Error Tolerance in the Real-Time Transport Protocol

TL;DR

This paper proposes a receiver-based error-tolerant extension to RTP that recovers from header errors and accepts corrupted payloads, improving robustness in streaming applications without requiring sender changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel header error recovery scheme for RTP that is fully receiver-based, incrementally deployable, and does not alter the RTP protocol.

Findings

Recovers from nearly all header errors with minimal erroneous recoveries.

Effective up to about 10% bit error rates.

No changes needed in sender or RTP specification.

Abstract

Streaming applications often tolerate bit errors in their received data well. This is contrasted by the enforcement of correctness of the packet headers and payload by network protocols. We investigate a solution for the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) that is tolerant to errors by accepting erroneous data. It passes potentially corrupted stream data payloads to the codecs. If errors occur in the header, our solution recovers from these by leveraging the known state and expected header values for each stream. The solution is fully receiver-based and incrementally deployable, and as such requires neither support from the sender nor changes to the RTP specification. Evaluations show that our header error recovery scheme can recover from almost all errors, with virtually no erroneous recoveries, up to bit error rates of about 10%.