Video Quality Evaluation for Wireless Transmission with Robust Header Compression

IP Header compression mechanisms have always been an important topic for the research community to save bandwidth in the Internet. Due to the high license fees of 3G bands and the upcoming integration of IP based multimedia services, it is of particular importance to reduce the IP header overhead even in the wireless format. Reducing the IP overhead gives the network providers the possibility for a faster return of investment on their 3G networks and simultaneously enables real–time services by improving the latency of the IP packets over bandwidth limited links. Many compression methods exist already but they are either not designed for multimedia services, or not robust in the presence of error–prone links and therefore not suitable for wireless communication. For wireless environments robust header compression was introduced. Robust header compression was standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 3095 and will be an integral part of the 3GPP–UMTS specification. This compression scheme was designed to operate in error–prone environments by providing error detection and correction mechanisms in combination with robustness for IP based data streams. A connection oriented approach removing packet inter– and intra–dependencies reduces the IP header significantly. This paper gives a solid performance evaluation for robust header compression showing both the bandwidth savings for the IP protocol stack and the quality of services at the application layer by the means video services.