Support for Error Tolerance in the Real-Time Transport Protocol

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%.