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RObust Header Compression (ROHC) Performance for Multimedia Transmission over 3G/4G Wireless Networks

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Abstract

RObust Header Compression (ROHC) has recently been proposed to reduce the large protocol header overhead when transmitting voice and other continuous media over IP based protocol stacks in wireless networks. In this paper we evaluate the real-time transmission of GSM encoded voice and H.26L encoded video with ROHC over a wireless link. For the voice transmission we examine the impact of ROHC on the consumed bandwidth, the voice quality, and the delay jitter in the voice signal. We find that for a wide range of error probabilities on the wireless link, ROHC roughly cuts the bandwidth required for the transmission of GSM encoded voice in half. In addition, ROHC improves the voice quality compared to transmissions without ROHC, especially for large bit error probabilities on the wireless link. The improvement reaches 0.26 on the 5-point Mean Opinion Score for a bit error probability of 10−3. For the video transmission we examine the impact of ROHC on the consumed bandwidth. We find that the bandwidth savings with ROHC depend on the quantization scale used for the video encoding and the video content and ranges between 5–40% for typical scenarios.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Denmark

    Frank H. P. Fitzek

  2. Electronic Measurement and Diagnostics group, Technical University, Berlin, Germany

    Stephan Rein

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University, Goldwater Center MC 5706, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5706

    Patrick Seeling & Martin Reisslein

Authors
  1. Frank H. P. Fitzek
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  2. Stephan Rein
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  4. Martin Reisslein
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Correspondence to Frank H. P. Fitzek.

Additional information

Frank H.P. Fitzek is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Technology, University of Aalborg, Denmark heading the Future Vision group. He received his diploma (Dipl.-Ing.) degree in electrical engineering from the University of Technology – Rheinisch-Westflische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) – Aachen, Germany, in 1997 and his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University Berlin, Germany in 2002. As a visiting student at the Arizona State University he conducted research in the field of video services over wireless networks. He co-founded the start-up company acticom GmbH in Berlin in 1999. In 2002 he was Adjunct Professor at the University of Ferrara, Italy giving lectures on wireless communications and conducting research on multi-hop networks. His current research interests are in the areas of 4G wireless communication, QoS support for multimedia services, access techniques, security for wireless communication, and the integration of multi hop networks in cellular systems. Dr. Fitzek serves on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. He is the program chair for the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE2004) and serves in the program committee for VTC2003, VTC2004, ACE2004, and IEEE MWN2004.

Stephan Rein studied Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, and the Technical University of Berlin (TUB), Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the TUB in 2003. From March 2003 to October 2003 he visited the multimedia networking group in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Institute for Energy and Automation Technology, Technical University of Berlin. His current research interests include data compression and digital signal processing with emphasis on wavelet theory.

Patrick Seeling received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in industrial engineering and management (specializing in electrical engineering) from the Technical University of Berlin (TUB), Germany, in 2002. Since 2003 he has been a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University. His research interests are in the area of video communications in wired and wireless networks. He is a student member of the IEEE and the ACM.

Martin Reisslein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University, Tempe. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (FH) degree from the Fachhochschule Dieburg, Germany, in 1994, and the M.S.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1996. Both in electrical engineering. He received his Ph.D. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. During the academic year 1994–1995 he visited the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright scholar. From July 1998 through October 2000 he was a scientist with the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD FOKUS), Berlin. While in Berlin he was teaching courses on performance evaluation and computer networking at the Technical University Berlin. He is editor-in-chief of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials and has served on the Technical Program Committees of IEEE Infocom, IEEE Globecom, and the IEEE International Symposium on Computer and Communications. He has organized sessions at the IEEE Computer Communications Workshop (CCW). He maintains an extensive library of video traces for network performance evaluation, including frame size traces of MPEG-4 and H.263 encoded video, at http://trace.eas.asu.edu. He is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award of the SPIE Photonics East 2000 – Terabit Optical Networking conference. His research interests are in the areas of Internet Quality of Service, video traffic characterization, wireless networking, and optical networking.

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Fitzek, F.H.P., Rein, S., Seeling, P. et al. RObust Header Compression (ROHC) Performance for Multimedia Transmission over 3G/4G Wireless Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 32, 23–41 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-005-7733-2

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