1. Introduction

This memorandum specifies the real-time transport protocol (RTP), which provides end-to-end delivery services for data with real-time characteristics, such as interactive audio and video. Those services include payload type identification, sequence numbering, timestamping and delivery monitoring. Applications typically run RTP on top of UDP to make use of its multiplexing and checksum services; both protocols contribute parts of the transport protocol functionality. However, RTP may be used with other suitable underlying network or transport protocols (see Section 10). RTP supports data transfer to multiple destinations using multicast distribution if provided by the underlying network.

Note that RTP itself does not provide any mechanism to ensure timely delivery or provide other quality-of-service guarantees, but relies on lower-layer services to do so. It does not guarantee delivery or prevent out-of-order delivery, nor does it assume that the underlying network is reliable and delivers packets in sequence. The sequence numbers included in RTP allow the receiver to reconstruct the sender's packet sequence, but sequence numbers might also be used to determine the proper location of a packet, for example in video decoding, without necessarily decoding packets in sequence.

While RTP is primarily designed to satisfy the needs of multi- participant multimedia conferences, it is not limited to that particular application. Storage of continuous data, interactive distributed simulation, active badge, and control and measurement applications may also find RTP applicable.

This document defines RTP, consisting of two closely-linked parts:

• the real-time transport protocol (RTP), to carry data that has real-time properties.

• the RTP control protocol (RTCP), to monitor the quality of service and to convey information about the participants in an on-going session. The latter aspect of RTCP may be sufficient for "loosely controlled" sessions, i.e., where there is no explicit membership control and set-up, but it is not necessarily intended to support all of an application's control communication requirements. This functionality may be fully or partially subsumed by a separate session control protocol, which is beyond the scope of this document.

RTP represents a new style of protocol following the principles of application level framing and integrated layer processing proposed by Clark and Tennenhouse [1]. That is, RTP is intended to be malleable to provide the information required by a particular application and will often be integrated into the application processing rather than being implemented as a separate layer. RTP is a protocol framework that is deliberately not complete. This document specifies those functions expected to be common across all the applications for which RTP would be appropriate. Unlike conventional protocols in which additional functions might be accommodated by making the protocol more general or by adding an option mechanism that would require parsing, RTP is intended to be tailored through modifications and/or additions to the headers as needed. Examples are given in Sections 5.3 and 6.3.3.

Therefore, in addition to this document, a complete specification of RTP for a particular application will require one or more companion documents (see Section 12):

• a profile specification document, which defines a set of payload type codes and their mapping to payload formats (e.g., media encodings). A profile may also define extensions or modifications to RTP that are specific to a particular class of applications. Typically an application will operate under only one profile. A profile for audio and video data may be found in the companion RFC TBD.

• payload format specification documents, which define how a particular payload, such as an audio or video encoding, is to be carried in RTP.

A discussion of real-time services and algorithms for their implementation as well as background discussion on some of the RTP design decisions can be found in [2].

Several RTP applications, both experimental and commercial, have already been implemented from draft specifications. These applications include audio and video tools along with diagnostic tools such as traffic monitors. Users of these tools number in the thousands. However, the current Internet cannot yet support the full potential demand for real-time services. High-bandwidth services using RTP, such as video, can potentially seriously degrade the quality of service of other network services. Thus, implementors should take appropriate precautions to limit accidental bandwidth usage. Application documentation should clearly outline the limitations and possible operational impact of high-bandwidth real- time services on the Internet and other network services.