An End-to-End IP Header Compressed Packet Forwarding Framework for Bandwidth-Constrained Networks

IP header compression technologies such as Robust Header Compression (ROHC) are well-known to improve bandwidth efficiency strategy using resource-constrained communication links. However, ROHC is a point-to-point approach so it must be maintained by the per-flow and per-hop, which is disadvantageous for bandwidth constrained networks (BCNs) featured by multi-hops transmission. In order to solve this problem, an efficient end-to-end IP header compressed packet forwarding framework for BCNs is proposed in this paper. Firstly, an end-to-end ROHC tunnel is established through the multi-hop transmission scheme. Then, based on the offer/answer model, a fast negotiation mechanism is established to ensure the context identifier (CID) is globally unique. Finally, the intermediate forwarder determines the next hop forwarding path according to CID. Therefore, besides reducing the transmission bandwidth and time consumption of compression and decompression per hop, it can also speed up forwarding the packets among BCNs. The simulation results show that the proposed framework improves forwarding efficiency and reduces end-to-end delivery latency and node power consumption in a BCN, which is independent of the channel conditions and the bit error rate.