Tool Description: RTCP - RFC3550

RTCP forms part of the RTP protocol used to carry Voice over IP. RTCP provides simple packet loss, jitter and endpoint "wallclock" time information.

RFC 3550: RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications

The newer RFC3611 RTCP XR protocol has a helpful Voice over IP Metrics Payload that contains much useful information.

Applications

RTCP is not widely implemented and hence information may not be available from all endpoints. When available, RTCP packets can be captured and decoded by a network analyzer. Note that the jitter metric in RTCP is not particularly easy to relate to packet discard rate - it is quite possibly to have a low RTCP jitter metric but a high rate of discards.

RTCP XR provides a wealth of useful data including packet loss rate, discard rate, burst metrics, delay, signal level, noise level, echo return loss, call quality metrics and jitter buffer statistics.

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