Real-Time Transport Protocols for Telemetry Data and Signaling

Abstract

There are many network transport and application layer protocols that have been developed and designed for the delivery of time-sensitive and critical data over best-effort Ethernet networks. Choosing the appropriate protocols is crucial to ensuring the performance of the network for data transmission. Network layer protocols, such as TCP/IP or UDP/IP, determine the reliability of the data transmission while application layer protocols are designed to enhance the services of the underlying transport protocol. This paper will compare the Quality of Service (QoS) tradeoffs for both UDP and TCP. In this paper it is shown that UDP or TCP alone is insufficient to meet the transmission requirements of telemetry data and to overcome these limitations, an application layer protocol is required to enhance the delivery of real-time sensitive data. This paper presents the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and proposes a RTP telemetry profile payload definition that provides complete payload self-description and up to 98% packetization efficiency.