AVT                                                            J. Lennox
Internet-Draft                                                     Vidyo
Intended status: Standards Track                        October 20, 2009
Expires: April 23, 2010


  A Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) Header Extension for Client-to-
                      Mixer Audio Level Indication
               draft-lennox-avt-rtp-audio-level-exthdr-01

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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Abstract

   This document defines a mechanism by which packets of Real-Time
   Transport Protocol (RTP) audio streams can indicate, in an RTP header
   extension, the audio level of the audio sample carried in the RTP
   packet.  In large conferences, this can reduce the load on an audio
   mixer or other middlebox which wants to forward only a few of the
   loudest audio streams, without requiring it to decode and measure
   every stream that is received.


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   3.  Audio Levels  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   4.  Signaling (Setup) Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   5.  Considerations on Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   6.  Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   8.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
   9.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
     9.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
     9.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
   Appendix A.  Changes From Earlier Versions  . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
     A.1.  Changes From Individual Submission Draft -00  . . . . . . . 8
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8


















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1.  Introduction

   In a centralized Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) [RFC3550] audio
   conference, an audio mixer or forwarder receives audio streams from
   many or all of the conference participants.  It then selectively
   forwards some of them to other participants in the conference.  In
   large conferences, it is possible that such a server might be
   receiving a large number of streams, of which only a few should be
   forwarded to the other conference participants.

   In such a scenario, in order to pick the audio streams to forward, a
   centralized server needs to decode, measure audio levels, and
   possibly perform voice activity detection on audio data from a large
   number of streams.  The need for such processing limits the size or
   number of conferences such a server can support.

   As an alternative, this document defines an RTP header extension
   [RFC5285] through which senders of audio packets can indicate the
   audio level of the packets' payload, reducing the processing load for
   a server.

   The header extension in this draft is different to, but complementary
   with, the one defined in [I-D.ivov-avt-slic], which defines a
   mechanism by which audio mixers can indicate to clients the levels of
   the contributing sources that made up the mixed audio.


2.  Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119] and
   indicate requirement levels for compliant implementations.


3.  Audio Levels

   The audio level header extension carries both the level of the audio
   carried in the RTP payload of the packet it is associated with, as
   well as an indication as to whether voice activity has been detected
   in the packet.

   The form of the audio level extension block is as follows:








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          0                   1
          0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5
         +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
         |  ID   | len=0 |V| level       |
         +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+


                                 Figure 1

   The length field takes the value 0 to indicate that 1 byte follows.

   The audio level is defined in the same manner as is audio noise level
   in the RTP Comfort Noise [RFC3389] specification.  In that
   specification, the overall magnitude of the noise level is encoded
   into the first byte of the payload, with spectral information about
   the noise in subsequent bytes.  This specification's audio level
   parameter is defined so as to be identical to the comfort noise
   payload's noise-level byte.

   The magnitude of the audio level is packed into the seven least
   significant bits of the single byte of the header extension, shown in
   Figure 1.  The least significant bit of the audio level magnitude is
   packed into the least significant bit of the byte.  The most
   significant bit of the byte is used as a separate flag bit "V",
   defined below.

   The audio level is expressed in -dBov, with values from 0 to 127
   representing 0 to -127 dBov. dBov is the level, in decibels, relative
   to the overload point of the system, i.e. the maximum-amplitude
   signal that can be handled by the system without clipping.  (Note:
   Representation relative to the overload point of a system is
   particularly useful for digital implementations, since one does not
   need to know the relative calibration of the analog circuitry.)  For
   example, in the case of u-law (audio/pcmu) audio [ITU.G711.1988], the
   0 dBov reference would be a square wave with values +/- 8031.  (This
   translates to 6.18 dBm0, relative to u-law's dBm0 definition in Table
   6 of G.711.)

   In addition, a flag bit (labeled V) indicates whether the encoder
   believes the audio packet contains voice activity (1) or does not
   (0).  The voice activity detection algorithm is unspecified and left
   implementation-specific.

   The audio level for digital silence (e.g. all-0 pcmu audio), for
   example for a muted audio source, MAY be represented as 127 (-127
   dBov), regardless of the dynamic range of the encoded audio format.

   When this header extension is used with RTP data sent using the RTP



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   Payload for Redundant Audio Data [RFC2198], the header's data
   describes the contents of the primary encoding.


4.  Signaling (Setup) Information

   The URI for declaring this header extension in an extmap attribute is
   "urn:ietf:params:rtp-hdrext:audio-level".  There is no additional
   setup information needed for this extension (no extensionattributes).


5.  Considerations on Use

   Mixers and forwarders generally should not base audio forwarding
   decisions directly on packet-by-packet audio level information, but
   rather should apply some analysis of the audio levels and trends.
   This general rule applies whether audio levels are provided by
   endpoints (as defined in this document), or are calculated at a
   server, as would be done in the absence of this information.  This
   section discusses several issues that mixers and forwarders may wish
   to take into account.  (Note that this section provides design
   guidance only, and is not normative.)

   First of all, audio levels should generally be measured over longer
   intervals than that of a single audio packet.  In order to avoid
   false-positives for short bursts of sound (such as a cough or a
   dropped microphone), it is often useful to require that a
   participant's audio level be maintained for some period of time
   before considering it to be "real", i.e. some type of low-pass filter
   should be applied to the audio levels.  Note, though, that such
   filtering must be balanced with the need to avoid clipping of the
   beginning of a speaker's speech.

   Additionally, different participants may have their audio input set
   differently.  It may be useful to apply some sort of automatic gain
   control to the audio levels.  There are a number of possible
   approaches to acheiving this, e.g. by measuring peak audio levels, by
   average audio levels during speech, or by measuring background audio
   levels (average audio level levels during non-speech).


6.  Limitations

   The audio levels carried by the extension header defined by this
   document are defined as dBov, decibels below system overload.

   In principle, it could be more useful to have, instead, dB SPL,
   decibels of sound pressure level.  In traditional telephony systems,



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   telephone handsets were calibrated such that a particular (e.g.)
   u-law audio level, or analog voltage, corresponded to a particular
   sound pressure level at the handset's mouthpiece.

   However, in many environments, this information is not available.
   Notably, PC soundcard hardware can only determine the levels of mic-
   or line-in at the hardware input, and operating systems usually allow
   further adjustments of audio input levels without providing
   information about these transformations to applications.
   Furthermore, in many circumstances, such as speech synthesis or mixed
   audio, an "audio" signal may in fact never have actually existed as
   sound pressure at all.

   Thus, while information about the correspondance between dB SPL and
   dBov, or encoded audio, could be useful, this document does not
   attempt to define it.  If there are circumstances in which this
   information would be useful, a separate header extension would be
   straightforward to define.  (The information carried by such a header
   extension could indeed be useful independently from the information
   in the header extension defined by this document.)


7.  Security Considerations

   A malicious endpoint could choose to set the values in this header
   extension falsely, so as to falsely claim that audio or voice is or
   is not present.  It is not clear what could be gained by falsely
   claiming that audio is not present, but an endpoint falsely claiming
   that audio is present could perform a denial-of-service attack on an
   audio conference, so as to send silence to suppress other conference
   members' audio.  Thus, a device relying on audio level data from
   untrusted endpoints SHOULD periodically audit the level information
   transmitted, taking appropriate corrective action if endpoints appear
   to be sending incorrect data.  (Note that endpoints MAY choose to
   measure audio levels prior to encoding, so some degree of discrepancy
   SHOULD be tolerated.)

   In the Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) [RFC3711], RTP
   header extensions are authenticated but not encrypted.  When this
   header extension is used, audio levels are therefore visible on a
   packet-by-packet basis to an attacker passively observing the audio
   stream.  As discussed in [I-D.perkins-avt-srtp-vbr-audio], such an
   attacker might be able to infer information about the conversation,
   possibly with phoneme-level resolution.  In scenarios where this is a
   concern, additional mechanisms SHOULD be used to protect the
   confidentiality of the header extension.  One solution would be
   header extension encryption
   [I-D.lennox-avt-srtp-encrypted-extension-headers].



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8.  IANA Considerations

   This document defines a new extension URI to the RTP Compact Header
   Extensions subregistry of the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP)
   Parameters registry, according to the following data:

   Extension URI:  urn:ietf:params:rtp-hdrext:audio-level
   Description:  Audio Level
   Contact:  jonathan@vidyo.com
   Reference:  RFC XXXX


9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC2198]  Perkins, C., Kouvelas, I., Hodson, O., Hardman, V.,
              Handley, M., Bolot, J., Vega-Garcia, A., and S. Fosse-
              Parisis, "RTP Payload for Redundant Audio Data", RFC 2198,
              September 1997.

   [RFC3550]  Schulzrinne, H., Casner, S., Frederick, R., and V.
              Jacobson, "RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time
              Applications", STD 64, RFC 3550, July 2003.

   [RFC5285]  Singer, D. and H. Desineni, "A General Mechanism for RTP
              Header Extensions", RFC 5285, July 2008.

9.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ivov-avt-slic]
              Ivov, E. and E. Marocco, "A Real-Time Transport Protocol
              (RTP) Extension Header for Mixer-to- client  Audio Level
              Indication", draft-ivov-avt-slic-01 (work in progress),
              October 2009.

   [I-D.lennox-avt-srtp-encrypted-extension-headers]
              Lennox, J., "Encryption of Header Extensions in the Secure
              Real-Time Transport Protocol  (SRTP)",
              draft-lennox-avt-srtp-encrypted-extension-headers-00 (work
              in progress), October 2009.

   [I-D.perkins-avt-srtp-vbr-audio]
              Perkins, C., "Guidelines for the use of Variable Bit Rate
              Audio with Secure RTP",



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              draft-perkins-avt-srtp-vbr-audio-01 (work in progress),
              July 2009.

   [ITU.G711.1988]
              International Telecommunications Union, "Pulse code
              modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies", ITU-
              T Recommendation G.711, November 1988.

   [RFC3389]  Zopf, R., "Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) Payload for
              Comfort Noise (CN)", RFC 3389, September 2002.

   [RFC3711]  Baugher, M., McGrew, D., Naslund, M., Carrara, E., and K.
              Norrman, "The Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP)",
              RFC 3711, March 2004.


Appendix A.  Changes From Earlier Versions

   Note to the RFC-Editor: please remove this section prior to
   publication as an RFC.

A.1.  Changes From Individual Submission Draft -00

   o  The draft name has been changed to clarify that this document
      defines Client-To-Mixer Audio Levels, to more clearly distinguish
      it from [I-D.ivov-avt-slic].
   o  The header extension format has been changed from a two-byte to a
      one-byte payload, eliminating the 7 reserved bits and the one
      must-be-zero bit.
   o  The sections Considerations on Use (Section 5) and Limitations
      (Section 6) have been added.
   o  It has been noted that senders MAY indicate -127 dBov for digital
      silence, and that level measurement MAY be done prior to encoding
      audio.
   o  A reference to [I-D.lennox-avt-srtp-encrypted-extension-headers]
      has been added to the security considerations.
   o  The term "header extension" is now used consistentenly throughout
      the document (as opposed to "extension header").













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Author's Address

   Jonathan Lennox
   Vidyo, Inc.
   433 Hackensack Avenue
   Sixth Floor
   Hackensack, NJ  07601
   US

   Email: jonathan@vidyo.com









































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