Stateless IP header compression

Abstract

With the wireless and mobile access to the Internet growing, compression of Internet protocol (IP) headers is seen as crucial to maximally utilize scarce wireless bandwidth. The traditional IP compression schemes rely on consistent per-flow state in order to perform header compression. While these approaches focus on compression gain, i.e., the reduction in the number of header bytes as a percentage of the total packet size, the overhead is the cost of managing state per each unidirectional flow. In this document, we present a new header compression scheme with the emphasis on reducing or even eliminating the state, perhaps at the cost of reduced compression gain compared to the existing methods. We make use of existing route table information in order to achieve the state reduction. The net result is that significant compression gain can be achieved at a greatly reduced cost of maintaining and managing per-flow state information. This could be especially beneficial for short-lived flows.