R-RoHC: A Single Adaptive Solution for Header Compression

In point to multi-point wireless transmissions, header compression protocols like RoHC (Robust Header Compression) can degrade the communication when used on fading channels and, at the same time, introduce long periods of silence, due to decompression problems at the receiver side. This paper presents R-RoHC, a reactive header compression mechanism designed to cope with RoHC misbehavior in case of point to multi-point multimedia streaming over wireless networks. We propose to exploit cross-layer information to trigger a recovery procedure in critical decompression conditions: R-RoHC sends few extra uncompressed packets whenever the static context (i.e., uncompressed and not changing part of the headers) is missing at the receiver side, thus allowing a successful decompression without requiring any modifications of the RoHC state machine and its timeouts.