Performance evaluation and comparison of RObust Header Compression (ROHC) ROHCv1 and ROHCv2 for multimedia delivery

In this paper the two implementations of RObust Header Compression (ROHC), namely ROHCv1 (RFC 3095) and ROHCv2 (RFC 5225), are evaluated in terms of potential throughput increase and complexity for wireless IP networks and compared with each other for different multimedia streams. In order to compress the header information to a minimum, RoHCv1 has been proposed some years back and recently RoHCv2 has been proposed with a complete redesign compared to its predecessor. The novelty of this paper is the presentation of the performance evaluation of ROHCv2 as well as a comparison between the two approaches that have never been published before. In addition, this paper presents real-world performance measurements of ROHCv2 for the first time. Our findings show that both versions have great potential in saving bandwidth for multimedia traffic in wireless networks, even with varying channel conditions by an IP/UDP/RTP header a compression gain of 83% and 86% is possible for ROHCv1 and ROHCv2, respectively. While the second version of ROHC is giving generally slightly better compression ratios than the first version, we found situations where the first version performs better.