AVP: A Highly Efficient Transport Protocol for Low Bit Rate Multimedia Communications

Utilization of Internet communications in distance learning, distributed simulation, and distributed work groups involves multimedia transmission of animation, voice and video clips. Highly compressed audio-video data protocols are required for efficient Internet multimedia communications. Addressing this requirement, a new transport protocol called Audio-Video Protocol (AVP) for highly efficient multimedia communications on the Internet is presented. While providing similar real-time delivery functions as Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Real-Time Control Protocol (RTCP), AVP adopts a novel audio-based synchronization scheme. This synchronization scheme has two advantages. One is the overhead reduction through eliminating the timestamp in each transmitted data packet. The other is the packet rate reduction by putting multiple audio frames or mixed audio-video frames in a single AVP packet. As a result, the end-to-end media unit delay is reduced while achieving implicit synchronization. Furthermore, AVP provides adaptive quality of service (QoS) by the prioritized packetization scheme. Simulation results are presented to verify the advantages of the AVP protocol.