After some evaluation of bandwidth requirements for Mobile VoIP it
appeared very clear to me that the standard RTP cause really, a lot of
overhead, in the ip transport.
In order to reduce the bandwidth requirement of an RTP stream several
proposal appeared like CRTP (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3545.html) and
ROHC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROHC) .
ROHC is the winner of the standard for RTP header compression and will
even be used in 4G telephony.
BUT those standards are only designed for point-to-point connections.
This means that they can do compression over a point-to-point channel
like the one between the mobile-phone and the BTS, or between two
endpoints connected with a dedicated E1/T1 line.
However those standards are not good for generic usage over today,
commonly available, ip networks.
Fring, talkonaut and a lot of other mobile voip software implement a
cutted-down version of RTP in order to stay even within the GPRS
bandwidth requirements.
It's simply a matter of reducing the 12byte RTP header to something more
pragmatic for mobile use.
My questions is:
A standard for such kind of optimization exists? To me appear not to exists.
In XMPP world a standard very efficient appeared: NO HEADER, raw udp
transport: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0177.html
If it does not exists, does it could be possible to work on something
like a reference implementation?
Are there other companies interested in having a mobile voip client with
very narrowband requirements that can work even on GPRS like Fring and
Talkonaut by creating a stripped down version of RTP?
From an implementation point of view, unfortunately, it seems to me
that this kind of protocol (stripped down minimalistic RTP) must be
implemented not only on the client side (pjsip) but also on a server
side with some kind of proxying technology:
VoIP client with stripped RTP <----> RTP (stripped) to RTP
(non-stripped) proxy <---> RTP gateway (Asterisk, Yate or whatever)
What the community think about it?
Fabio