Efficient transport of voice over IP over cellular links

Internet and cellular technologies are merging to decrease transport costs and enable IP-based applications to hundreds of millions of cellular users. Real time voice services will continue to be dominant in future cellular systems and to reduce system costs it is desirable to base all services, including voice, on IP. However, the radio spectrum must be efficiently used to provide mass-market services at reasonable prices, but Internet protocol headers are large in size. Moreover, data discarding policies are poorly suited to the error-proneness of cellular links. Protocol overhead for IP-based voice services can be reduced by compressing headers, e.g. with the compressed real time protocol (CRTP). CRTP, however, does not perform well over cellular links since it is not robust in the face of errors. ROCCO, a header compression scheme suitable for cellular systems, delivers more packets to the user than CRTP at realistic error rates with a better average compression ratio. Voice services in cellular systems should also be able to use damaged speech data. This can be done using the UDP Lite protocol which provides a more flexible checksumming policy that enables delivery of data possibly usable to the application. This paper shows that CRTP/UDP fails to deliver sufficient service quality at the error rates of a cost-efficient cellular system and that ROCCO combined with UDP Lite can provide an IP-based voice service over such cellular systems.