1. Introduction

Packet losses between an RTP sender and receiver may significantly degrade the quality of the received media. Several techniques, such as forward error correction (FEC), retransmissions, or interleaving, may be considered to increase packet loss resiliency. RFC 2354 [8] discusses the different options.

When choosing a repair technique for a particular application, the tolerable latency of the application has to be taken into account. In the case of multimedia conferencing, the end-to-end delay has to be at most a few hundred milliseconds in order to guarantee interactivity, which usually excludes the use of retransmission.

With sufficient latency, the efficiency of the repair scheme can be increased. The sender may use the receiver feedback in order to react to losses before their playout time at the receiver.

In the case of multimedia streaming, the user can tolerate an initial latency as part of the session set-up and thus an end-to-end delay of several seconds may be acceptable. RTP retransmission as defined in this document is targeted at such applications.

Furthermore, the RTP retransmission method defined herein is applicable to unicast and (small) multicast groups. The present document defines a payload format for retransmitted RTP packets and provides protocol rules for the sender and the receiver involved in retransmissions.

This retransmission payload format was designed for use with the extended RTP profile for RTCP-based feedback, AVPF [1]. It may also be used with other RTP profiles defined in the future.

The AVPF profile allows for more frequent feedback and for early feedback. It defines a general-purpose feedback message, i.e., NACK, as well as codec and application-specific feedback messages. See [1] for details.