An implementation and performance evaluation of kernel-level RTP supporting the BSD socket API

RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) has been designed for efficient transmission of real-time multimedia data on the Internet by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Different applications tend to implement separate RTPs as a library. In order to resolve this problem, embeddedRTP was proposed as an RTP-based kernel-level protocol. This paper proposes the ExtendedERTP protocol based on the embeddedRTP protocol. This new protocol deals with a couple of issues, such as packet processing overhead and buffer requirement, and combines its Application Programming Interface (API) with Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) socket's which have been widely utilized in network applications. This paper demonstrates that this integration makes it possible to transmit real-time multimedia data through the existing interface of BSD socket API with nominal extra overhead. This paper also shows that the time and memory requirement for packet processing can be reduced by about 15–20% and by 3.5%, respectively, compared with those of embeddedRTP. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ExtendedERTP made it unnecessary for application developers to learn the new system call interface to utilize RTP. EmbeddedRTP's memory usage was significantly reduced through reference buffer in buffer management. In addition, ExtendedERTP resolved the problem of embeddedRTP so that it provides only non-blocking reception of streaming data. This paper demonstrates that this integration makes it possible to transmit real-time multimedia data through the existing interface of BSD socket APIs with nominal extra overhead. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.