Performance comparison of header compression schemes for RTP/UDP/IP packets

Multimedia over wireless is one of the major applications envisioned for the next generation all-IP wireless networks. To efficiently use the scarce radio resources, header compression schemes are proposed to remove redundant information in the RTP/UDP/IP headers and yet still provide reliable communications over the error prone wireless links. In this paper, we study and compare the performance of two of the most popular header compression schemes: enhanced compressed RTP (ECRTP) and robust header compression (ROHC). Our simulation results show that the packet error rate (PER) performance of ECRTP and ROHC is similar to each other when the local repair mechanism in ROHC is not considered. The only exception is ROHC U mode, where the PER is much worse. All ROHC modes have lower average header size and overhead than ECRTP. In particular, ROHC R mode offers the lowest average header size and overhead in the cases we studied.