6. Multiplexing, Bandwidth, and Quality of Service

Multiplexing RTP and RTCP has implications on the use of the Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism that handles flow that are determined by a three or five tuple (protocol, port, and address for source and/or destination). In these cases, the RTCP flow will be merged with the RTP flow when multiplexing them together. Thus, the RTCP bandwidth requirement needs to be considered when doing QoS reservations for the combined RTP and RTCP flow. However, from an RTCP perspective it is beneficial to receive the same treatment of RTCP packets as for RTP as it provides more accurate statistics for the measurements performed by RTCP.

The bandwidth required for a multiplexed stream comprises the session bandwidth of the RTP stream plus the bandwidth used by RTCP. In the usual case, the RTP session bandwidth is signalled in the SDP "b=AS:" (or "b=TIAS:" [11]) line, and the RTCP traffic is limited to 5% of this value. Any QoS reservation SHOULD therefore be made for 105% of the "b=AS:" value. If a non-standard RTCP bandwidth fraction is used, signalled by the SDP "b=RR:" and/or "b=RS:" lines [12], then any QoS reservation SHOULD be made for bandwidth equal to (AS + RS + RR), taking the RS and RR values from the SDP answer.