Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
6.2.1 Maintaining the number of session members

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6.2.1 Maintaining the number of session members

6.2.1 Maintaining the number of session members

Calculation of the RTCP packet interval depends upon an estimate of the number of sites participating in the session. New sites are added to the count when they are heard, and an entry for each is created in a table indexed by the SSRC or CSRC identifier (see Section 8.2) to keep track of them. New entries may not be considered valid until multiple packets carrying the new SSRC have been received (see Appendix A.1). Entries may be deleted from the table when an RTCP BYE packet with the corresponding SSRC identifier is received.

A participant may mark another site inactive, or delete it if not yet valid, if no RTP or RTCP packet has been received for a small number of RTCP report intervals (5 is suggested). This provides some robustness against packet loss. All sites must calculate roughly the same value for the RTCP report interval in order for this timeout to work properly.

Once a site has been validated, then if it is later marked inactive the state for that site should still be retained and the site should continue to be counted in the total number of sites sharing RTCP bandwidth for a period long enough to span typical network partitions. This is to avoid excessive traffic, when the partition heals, due to an RTCP report interval that is too small. A timeout of 30 minutes is suggested. Note that this is still larger than 5 times the largest value to which the RTCP report interval is expected to usefully scale, about 2 to 5 minutes.


Next: 6.2.2 Allocation of source description bandwidth

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
6.2.1 Maintaining the number of session members