ROHC in LTE

The ROHC function in LTE is part of Layer-2 at the user plane of the UE and eNB. Both UE and eNB
behave as a compressor and decompressor for the user-plane packets in DL and UL. The
compression efficiency depends on the ROHC operating mode and the variations in the dynamic
part of the packet headers at the application layer. A header can be compressed to one byte with
ROHC, which efficiently reduces the voice packet size.

ROHC in LTE operates in following three modes, the reliability of these modes and overheads used
for transmitting feedback are different

1) U-Mode (Unidirectional): In U-Mode, packets can only be sent from the compressor to the
de-compressor, with no mandatory feedback channel. U-Mode has the lowest reliability but
requires the minimum overhead for feedback
2) O-Mode (Bidirectional Optimistic): In O-Mode, the decompressor can send feedback to
indicate failed decompression or successful context update so it provides higher reliability
than U-Mode but it generates less feedback compared to R-Mode
3) R-Mode (Bidirectional Reliable): In R-Mode, context synchronization between the
compressor and de-compressor are ensured only by the feedback. That is, the compressor
sends the context updating packets repeatedly until acknowledgment is received from the
de-compressor. Therefore, R-Mode provides the highest reliability but generates the
maximum overhead due to the mandatory acknowledgment.

ROHC with VOLTE

ROHC can be applied to any application where we have very frequent transaction of small
packets like voice over IP, interactive games, messaging. As here we are talking about LTE and
Voice i.e. VoLTE, ROHC would be very useful for VoLTE application as it have a lot of small data
carried by huge IP packets. For example, there can be a cases where only around 32 bytes of
voice data (coded data) carried with a 60 bytes of header. In this case, only header parts takes
more resources than the real data so this kind of packet can be a good candidate for ROHC.

As we aware, VoLTE has two types of packets, one for SIP signaling and the other voice traffic
packet. The voice traffic tend to be a very small data size but have very frequent transmission.
So ROHC can be a very efficient solution to save network resources. Where as for SIP signaling
packets are relatively large comparing to header size and not very frequent transmission so
header compression may not be so efficient because SIP signaling packet. Although, even in SIP
packets case we can save a little bit of resource, but the processing overhead resulted by
header compression can be even bigger which is not a wise solution. Hence, ROHC does not
apply to SIP signaling message packet in real scenarios.