Patent ID: 7583695

Claim:
A system comprising: a packet-switched telecommunication network comprising: fixed communications connections, operating nodes, base station subsystems, and wireless terminals, and a backbone network; and a protocol converter coupled between the operating nodes and the backbone network, the protocol converter configured to process a header of an RTP packet according to the IETF standard RFC 1889 as a header according to a reduced RTP protocol, containing four bytes at the most, so that a packet containing an audio signal sample is transferred on a wireless connection between a wireless terminal and a base station subsystem by utilizing the reduced RTP protocol for saving communications capacity, wherein the protocol converter is configured to: carry out conversion from reduced RTP protocol to standard RTP protocol; carry out conversion from standard RTP protocol to reduced RTP protocol; and where the header of a reduced RTP packet comprises the following fields: an Identification (F) field one bit long indicating if the packet includes a header of the reduced RTP protocol; a Marker (M) field one bit long according to RTP protocol; a Reserved (R) field one bit long; a Check (C) field one bit long indicating if a checksum field is included in the reduced RTP header; a Synchronization (S) field one bit long indicating if a synchronization source has been changed; a Payload Type (PT) field three bits long indicating a payload type; and a Sequence Number (SN) field eight bits long indicating an ordinal number of the RTP packet.