RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications

This memorandum is a revision of RFC 1889 in preparation for advancement from Proposed Standard to Draft Standard status. Readers are encouraged to use the PostScript form of this draft to see where changes from RFC 1889 are marked by change bars. This memorandum describes RTP, the real-time transport protocol. RTP provides end-to-end network transport functions suitable for applications transmitting real-time data, such as audio, video or simulation data, over multicast or unicast network services. RTP does not address resource reservation and does not guarantee quality-of-service for real-time services. The data transport is augmented by a control protocol (RTCP) to allow monitoring of the data delivery in a manner scalable to large multicast networks, and to provide minimal control and identification functionality. RTP and RTCP are designed to be independent of the underlying transport and network layers. The protocol supports the use of RTP-level translators and mixers. This specification is a product of the Audio/Video Transport working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force. Comments are solicited and should be addressed to the working group’s mailing list at [email protected] and/or the authors. INTERNET-DRAFT ietf-avt-rtp-new-04.ps June 26, 1999