A heuristic header error recovery scheme for RTP

Streaming applications often tolerate bit errors in their received data well. This is contrasted by the enforcement of correctness of the packet headers and payload by network protocols. We investigate a solution for the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) that is tolerant to errors by accepting erroneous data. It recovers from header errors by leveraging the known state of a stream, passing potentially corrupted payloads to the codecs. It is a receiver-based solution that requires neither support from the sender nor changes to the RTP specification. Evaluations show that our header error recovery scheme can recover from almost all errors, with virtually no erroneous recoveries, up to bit error rates of about 10%.