Performance evaluation and implementation of IP and robust header compression schemes for TCP and UDP traffic in static and dynamic wireless contexts

Abstract

Modern cellular networks utilising the long-term evolution (LTE) set of standards face an ever-increasing demand for mobile data from connected devices. Header compression is commonly employed to minimise the overhead for IP-based cellular network traffic. In this paper, we evaluate the three header compression implementations used by these networks with respect to their potential throughput increase and complexity for different mobile service scenarios over wireless IP networks. Specifically, we consider header compression as defined by (i) IP Header Compression (RFC 2507), (ii) Robust Header Compression version 1 (RFC 3095), and (iii) the recently updated Robust Header Compression version 2 (RFC 5225) with TCP/IP profile (RFC 6846). The contribution of this article is the performance evaluation of IP Header Compression (IPHC) for UDP and TCP, as well as its evaluation in contrast to the Robust Header Compression (RoHC) methods in a comparative overview for real-world mobile scenarios. Our results show that all implementations have great potential for saving bandwidth in IP-based wireless networks, even under varying channel conditions. While both RoHC versions generally provide more reliable results than IPHC, we find that on a unidirectional channel IPHC could perform better. However, if a TCP connection is prone to packet reordering (e.g., by retransmissions), IPHC's performance drops drastically, while RoHC's does not exhibit any significant performance reduction.

Unidirectional and Bidirectional Optimistic Modes IP Header Compression for Real-Time Video Streaming

“…The work was focused on the revenue and cost of radio resources. In a different approach, an evaluation of the three implementations of header compression was used by IP-based cellular network traffic [10]. It was observed that the compressed header savings typically range from 50 % to about 60 % for both RoHC versions and it is at 85 % for the IPHC with occasional uncompressed refreshes.…”

“…Many other new generation technologies that are expected to be designed in this area of compression will be for mobile phones and IoT. The adoption of ROHC technique in modern android mobile devices, is becoming widespread [10]. ROHC technology will not increase power consumption and it has a potential of decreasing mobile battery drain by 0.05 Watt, when packet payloads are small [10].…”

“…This is expected to achieve a high bandwidth gain. Some studies successfully developed RoHC compression algorithm and tests its efficiencies [9], [10] Quite a number of RoHC implementations were also revealed in [16] but do not use a real time RoHC measurements. For example, only U-mode was Implemented in those studies.…”

“…The simplicity of implementation or calculation of a header compression scheme is thus of lesser importance than its compression ratio and its robustness [9]. ROHC header compression defined in the IETF RFC3095 allows a very large increase in network capacity in the case of interactive multimedia streams [10]. RoHC is adopted by different mobile technologies.…”