Video quality evaluation for wireless transmission with robust header compression

Robust header compression (ROHC), an IP header compression mechanism for wireless environments, was recently standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 3095 and an integral part of the 3GPP-UMTS specifications. In this paper we conduct a thorough performance evaluation of video transmission over wireless links with ROHC. We find that ROHC can achieve significant bandwidth reductions for wireless video transmission. We demonstrate that the achieved compression depends to a large degree on the video content. We also demonstrate that ROHC does not affect the video quality. This is in contrast to recent ROHC evaluations for wireless voice transmissions, which indicate that ROHC does improve the voice quality.