The 18th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’07) COMPARISON OF HEADER COMPRESSION SCHEMES OVER SATELLITE LINKS

The last years have seen a burgeoning interest in Voice over IP (VoIP), also referred to as Internet or IP Telephony. The interest in this kind of communications is fueled by the raft of advan-tages that VoIP holds. Nonetheless, several strides remain to be made in order for VoIP systems to be on a par with the well engineered Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). From the network’s viewpoint, the downside of this application is the relatively high size of the IP/UDP/RTP headers compared to the packet’s payload, which translates in inefficient bandwidth utilization. This paper is intended to assess the performance of two well-known header compression schemes, that is, Com-pressed RTP (CRTP) and Enhanced CRTP, over satellite links. For the needs of the comparison a software platform was imple-mented which models the behavior of the satellite channel and permits the evaluation of different header compression schemes on real traffic. I