Widening the scope of a standard: Real time flows tunneling, compressing and multiplexing

The use of the Internet for delivering real-time traffic flows makes it necessary to fragment the information into small pieces, thus making the traffic have a bad efficiency. In order to avoid this, the IETF defined TCRTP as a mechanism capable of compressing headers and multiplexing a number of RTP packets into a bigger one, which was sent using a tunnel. However, some new applications that can be considered real-time, generate UDP or TCP packets, but do not use RTP. Based on some research results deployed in the academic context, a proposal for widening the scope of this standard is being developed in collaboration with the industry. Different traffics could be considered, and this would imply the possibility of utilizing a number of header compression algorithms, and also different multiplexing and tunneling protocols. This new standard could be used by different enterprises, as network operators, network equipment developers and game providers.