ROHC for Multicast Distribution Services

Abstract:
The header compression mechanisms have been defined to work on a peer-to-peer noisy links, nevertheless the interest to integrate these schemes in multicast diffusion is increasing because this option will offer bandwidth savings. In this paper, ROHC unidirectional mode is used as a current possibility to make header compression to multicast packets. In a multicast distribution service users join the group at any time. Thus, the use of ROHC header compression will create a waiting time to start receiving the application information because all the header information is sent in a periodical time. A Context Recovery Process (CRP) is proposed to improve ROHC multicast performance. This CRP reduces the waiting time to receive the context and may decrease the probability of context damage in a noisy link. The waiting time to receive the context is a new indicator to be considered in addition to ROHC performance indicators, when studying ROHC multicast performance. Our solution is evaluated by simulation means.