Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) – Brief Introduction

Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) – Brief Introduction

Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP)

This document is a brief introduction of real-time transport protocol (RTP), which provides end-to-end delivery services for data with real-time characteristics, such as interactive audio and video. Those services include payload type identification, sequence numbering, time-stamping and delivery monitoring. Applications typically run RTP on top of UDP to make use of its multiplexing and checksum services; both protocols contribute parts of the transport protocol functionality. However, RTP may be used with other suitable underlying network or transport protocols. RTP supports data transfer to multiple destinations using multicast distribution if provided by the underlying network.

Note that RTP itself does not provide any mechanism to ensure timely delivery or provide other quality-of-service guarantees, but relies on lower-layer services to do so. It does not guarantee delivery or prevent out-of-order delivery, nor does it assume that the underlying network is reliable and delivers packets in sequence. The sequence numbers included in RTP allow the receiver to reconstruct the sender’s packet sequence, but sequence numbers might also be used to determine the proper location of a packet, for example in video decoding, without necessarily decoding packets in sequence.

While RTP is primarily designed to satisfy the needs of multi-participant multimedia conferences, it is not limited to that particular application. Storage of continuous data, interactive distributed simulation, active badge, and control and measurement applications may also find RTP applicable.

RTP, consisting of two closely-linked parts:

• the real-time transport protocol (RTP), to carry data that has real-time properties.
• the RTP control protocol (RTCP), to monitor the quality of service and to convey information about the participants in an on-going session. The latter aspect of RTCP may be sufficient for “loosely controlled” sessions, i.e., where there is no explicit membership control and set-up, but it is not necessarily intended to support all of an application’s control communication requirements. This functionality may be fully or partially subsumed by a separate session control protocol, which is beyond the scope of this document.

RTP represents a new style of protocol following the principles of application level framing and integrated layer. That is, RTP is intended to be malleable to provide the information required by a particular application and will often be integrated into the application processing rather than being implemented as a separate layer. RTP is a protocol framework that is deliberately not complete.  Unlike conventional protocols in which additional functions might be accommodated by making the protocol more general or by adding an optional mechanism that would require parsing, RTP is intended to be tailored through modifications and/or additions to the headers as needed.

Several RTP applications, both experimental and commercial, have already been implemented from draft specifications. These applications include audio and video tools along with diagnostic tools such as traffic monitors. Users of these tools number in the thousands.  However, the current Internet cannot yet support the full potential demand for real-time services. High-bandwidth services using RTP, such as video, can potentially seriously degrade the quality of service of other network services. Thus, implementers should take appropriate precautions to limit accidental bandwidth usage. Application documentation should clearly outline the limitations and possible operational impact of high-bandwidth real-time services on the Internet and other network services.

RTP Use Scenarios

The following sections describe some aspects of the use of RTP. The examples were chosen to illustrate the basic operation of applications using RTP, not to limit what RTP may be used for. In these examples, RTP is carried on top of IP and UDP, and follows the conventions established by the profile for audio and video:

Simple Multicast Audio Conference

A working group of the IETF meets to discuss the latest protocol draft, using the IP multicast services of the Internet for voice communications. Through some allocation mechanism, the working group chair obtains a multicast group address and a pair of ports. One port is used for audio data, and the other is used for control (RTCP) packets.  This address and port information are distributed to the intended participants. If privacy is desired, the data and control packets may be encrypted, in which case an encryption key must also be generated and distributed.  The exact details of these allocation and distribution mechanisms are beyond the scope of RTP.

The audio conferencing application used by each conference participant sends audio data in small chunks of, say, 20 ms duration. Each chunk of audio data is preceded by an RTP header; RTP header and data are in turn contained in a UDP packet. The RTP header indicates what type of audio encoding (such as PCM, ADPCM or LPC) is contained in each packet so that senders can change the encoding during a conference, for example, to accommodate a new participant that is connected through a low-bandwidth link or react to indications of network congestion.

The Internet, like other packet networks, occasionally loses and reorders packets and delays them by variable amounts of time. To cope with these impairments, the RTP header contains timing information and a sequence number that allow the receivers to reconstruct the timing produced by the source so that in this example, chunks of audio are contiguously played out the speaker every 20 ms. This timing reconstruction is performed separately for each source of RTP packets in the conference. The sequence number can also be used by the receiver to estimate how many packets are being lost.

Since members of the working group join and leave during the conference, it is useful to know who is participating at any moment and how well they are receiving the audio data. For that purpose, each instance of the audio application in the conference periodically multicasts a reception report plus the name of its user on the RTCP (control) port. The reception report indicates how well the current speaker is being received and may be used to control adaptive encodings. In addition to the user name, other identifying information may also be included subject to control bandwidth limits. A site sends the RTCP BYE packet (Section 6.5) when it leaves the conference.

Audio and Video Conference

If both audio and video media are used in a conference, they are transmitted as separate RTP sessions RTCP packets are transmitted for each medium using two different UDP port pairs and/or multicast addresses. There is no direct coupling at the RTP level between the audio and video sessions, except that a user participating in both sessions should use the same distinguished (canonical) name in the RTCP packets for both so that the sessions can be associated.

One motivation for this separation is to allow some participants in the conference to receive only one medium if they choose. Despite the separation, synchronized playback of a source’s audio and video can be achieved using timing information carried in the RTCP packets for both sessions.

Mixers and Translators

So far, we have assumed that all sites want to receive media data in the same format. However, this may not always be appropriate. Consider the case where participants in one area are connected through a low-speed link to the majority of the conference participants who enjoy high-speed network access. Instead of forcing everyone to use a lower-bandwidth, reduced-quality audio encoding, an RTP-level relay called a mixer may be placed near the low-bandwidth area. This mixer resynchronizes incoming audio packets to reconstruct the constant 20 ms spacing generated by the sender, mixes these reconstructed audio streams into a single stream, translates the audio encoding to a lower-bandwidth one and forwards the lower-bandwidth packet stream across the low-speed link. These packets might be unicast to a single recipient or multicast on a different address to multiple recipients. The RTP header includes a means for mixers to identify the sources that contributed to a mixed packet so that correct talker indication can be provided at the receivers.

Some of the intended participants in the audio conference may be connected with high bandwidth links but might not be directly reachable via IP multicast. For example, they might be behind an application-level firewall that will not let any IP packets pass. For these sites, mixing may not be necessary, in which case another type of RTP-level relay called a translator may be used. Two translators are installed, one on either side of the firewall, with the outside one funneling all multicast packets received through a secure connection to the translator inside the firewall. The translator inside the firewall sends them again as multicast packets to a multicast group restricted to the site’s internal network.

Mixers and translators may be designed for a variety of purposes. An example is a video mixer that scales the images of individual people in separate video streams and composites them into one video stream to simulate a group scene. Other examples of translation include the connection of a group of hosts speaking only IP/UDP to a group of hosts that understand only ST-II, or the packet-by-packet encoding translation of video streams from individual sources without resynchronization or mixing.

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