1. General principles

The principle behind header compression is to reduce the redundancy of the information contained in a header, but also the redundancy between several consecutive headers. Thus, information that does not change is only sent at the beginning of the session or at a low rate; for other fields, a prediction or dependency mechanism further reduces the information transmitted.

The performance problems of IP protocols over low-speed links have been studied since 1984, when Farber and Delp specified the Thinwire protocol . In 1990, Van Jacobson (VJ) proposed a mechanism for compressing the TCP/IPv4 header from 40 bytes to 4 bytes...