A lighter UDP

Sammanfattning: With the advent of IP telephony and other real time multimedia applications running atop new wireless networks, new problems arise for the traditional Internet stack of protocols. Network and transport protocol support for these new applications has not yet been fully developed and optimized. Traditional UDP/IP support, especially in IPv6, provides a service that can throw away whole frames of user data (i.e., whole voice packets) when single bit errors are detected. Wireless networks make this last problem even worse since single bit errors can occur frequently. This work presents a new protocol, UDP Lite, that provides better support for real time multimedia mobile applications. UDP Lite provides a more flexible checksumming policy to the user so that the application decides what to do with user data (e.g., voice and video packets) that contain a small number of bit errors. UDP Lite allows the user to decide to keep as much of the data as he likes while still protecting the sensitive header fields. Beside presenting the protocol, the thesis present traffic studies, simulation results and architectural requirements from other parts in the protocol stack in order to use wireless bandwidth efficiently for realtime communication.