IETF RFC 5761 PDF

Introduction

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) [1] comprises two components: a data transfer protocol and an associated control protocol (RTCP). Historically, RTP and RTCP have been run on separate UDP ports. With increased use of Network Address Port Translation (NAPT) [14], this has become problematic, since maintaining multiple NAT bindings can be costly. It also complicates firewall administration, since multiple ports must be opened to allow RTP traffic. This memo discusses how the RTP and RTCP flows for a single media type can be run on a single port, to ease NAT traversal and simplify firewall administration, and considers when such multiplexing is appropriate. The multiplexing of several types of media (e.g., audio and video) onto a single port is not considered here (but see Section 5.2 of [1]).

This memo is structured as follows: in Section 2 we discuss the design choices that led to the use of separate ports and comment on the applicability of those choices to current network environments. We discuss terminology in Section 3 and how to distinguish multiplexed packets in Section 4; we then specify when and how RTP and RTCP should be multiplexed, and how to signal multiplexed sessions, in Section 5. Quality of service and bandwidth issues are discussed in Section 6. We conclude with security considerations in Section 7 and IANA considerations in Section 8.

This memo updates Section 11 of [1].