Applying Robust Header Compression Version 2 for UDP and RTP Broadcasting with Field Constraints

Next generation applications of wireless IP networks face an ever increasing demand of real-time dissemination of sensory and similar data to nearby devices. During situations when the transmission capabilities become scarce due to overused bandwidth, such as vehicular and various IoT use-cases, limiting the number of transmitted bytes over the wireless interfaces could ease the network load considerably. One of the main potential approaches for reducing the traffic in such scenarios is broadcasting, which could be even more efficient when paired with compression approaches, such as header compression. Normally header compression is employed to minimise the overhead of IP-based cellular traffic between two directly connected peers. However, in broadcasting scenarios, the compression has to balance the trade- off between servicing the least reliable channels (i.e., robustness to losses) and performing at peak compression rates (generating smaller packet headers). In order to circumvent these limitations, we propose a constraint on various IP and RTP fields when employing the industry-standard Robust Header Compression version 2 (which was designed for direct links) in a broadcast scenario without modifications of the underlying mechanisms, i.e., with full RFC compliance. With this approach the compression becomes impervious to packet losses up to 50% and for UDP profile compression with IPv6 it is practically unaffected by the link quality. In turn the compression retains at least 50% efficiency but can be as high as 90%.