Real-time Transport Protocol - Profiles and Payload Formats

Profiles and Payload Formats

One of the design considerations of RTP was to support a range of multimedia formats (such as H.264, MPEG-4, MJPEG, MPEG, etc.) and allow new formats to be added without revising the RTP standard. The design of RTP is based on the architectural principle known as application level framing (ALF). The information required by a specific application's needs is not included in the generic RTP header, but is instead provided through RTP profiles and payload formats. For each class of application (e.g., audio, video), RTP defines a profile and one or more associated payload formats. A complete specification of RTP for a particular application usage will require a profile and payload format specification(s).

The profile defines the codecs used to encode the payload data and their mapping to payload format codes in the Payload Type (PT) field of the RTP header (see below). Each profile is accompanied by several payload format specifications, each of which describes the transport of a particular encoded data. Some of the audio payload formats include: G.711, G.723, G.726, G.729, GSM, QCELP, MP3, DTMF etc., and some of the video payload formats include: H.261, H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 etc.

Examples of RTP Profiles include:

• The RTP profile for Audio and video conferences with minimal control (RFC 3551) defines a set of static payload type assignments, and a mechanism for mapping between a payload format, and a payload type identifier (in header) using Session Description Protocol (SDP).
• The Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) (RFC 3711) defines a profile of RTP that provides cryptographic services for the transfer of payload data.
• The experimental Control Data Profile for RTP (RTP/CDP) for machine-to-machine communications.