Performance Improvement of Multimedia flows by using UDP-Lite and ROUC compression

The use of ROHC (robust header compression) over low bandwidth and noisy links saves bandwidth and reduces packet loss by decreasing the probability of header corruption. Nevertheless, the packets can still be dropped if errors occur in payload. To counter this problem, the applications can use error resilient coders and in addition can use UDP-Lite protocol which allows applications to have partially damaged payload rather than discarded. Multimedia applications will benefit from the use of both ROHC and UDP-Lite. Both mechanisms reduce the number of packets dropped and improve the quality of multimedia flows. In this paper we compare and study the proposed strategies for using UDP-Lite with ROHC. Our results show significant improvements in the performance of multimedia flows