The invention relates to the field of high speed data transmission between two stations (10, 20) in a network, e.g. a video source (10) such as a professional video camera and a destination station (20), such as a data recorder or a video server. In the environment of a professional video studio, the captured video data is to be transferred over the network in uncompressed fashion without any loss of information. To handle such a high data rate efficiently, it is important to hold the protocol header - means protocol overhead - short.
According to the invention it is proposed to go one step further and not only hold the protocol overhead short but also to spare out the implementation of two protocol layers, thereby saving a lot of band width on the network and also a lot of implementation effort.
Normally, a real-time source and destination should use the IP/UDP/RTP protocol stack. For the purpose of transmitting uncompressed video data, it was recognized, that the minimum important information from the RTP and UDP protocol layers is the RTP sequence number. The sequence number is needed for performing the re-ordering task in case of intermixed data packets on the transfer path. The invention claims to move the sequence number from the RTP protocol layer to the IPv4 protocol layer into an optional field. The implementations of the IP protocol layers need to be adapted in source (10) and destination device (20), in order to handle the sequence number calculation and extraction.