Performance Evaluation and Implementation of IP and Robust Header Compression Schemes for TCP and UDP Traffic in Static and DynamicWireless Contexts

Máté Tömösközi1, 2, 3, 4, Patrick Seeling5, Péter Ekler3 and Frank H.P. Fitzek4

  1. acticom GmbH
    Am Borsigturm 42, 13507 Berlin, Germany
    mate.tomoskozi@[acticom.de, aut.bme.hu, tu-dresden.de]
  2. Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University
    Fredrik Bajers Vej 7B, DK 9220 Aalborg, Denmark
  3. Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics Hungary
    Q. Building, Magyar tudosok krt. 2., HU 1117 Budapest
    ekler.peter@aut.bme.hu
  4. Communication Networks Group, Technische Universität Dresden
    Helmholtzstraße 18, 01062 Dresden, Germany
    frank.fitzek@tu-dresden.de
  5. Department of Computer Science, Central Michigan University
    Mount Pleasant, MI 48859, USA
    pseeling@ieee.org

Abstract

Modern cellular networks utilizing 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 minimize 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 packets reordering (e.g., by retransmissions), IPHC’s performance drops drastically, while RoHC’s does not exhibit a significant performance impact.

Key words

Robust header compression; IP header compression; Mobile multimedia; Cellular networks; Bandwidth savings

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS151101006T

Publication information

Volume 14, Issue 2 (June 2017)
Year of Publication: 2017
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

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How to cite

Tömösközi, M., Seeling, P., Ekler, P., Fitzek, F. H.: Performance Evaluation and Implementation of IP and Robust Header Compression Schemes for TCP and UDP Traffic in Static and DynamicWireless Contexts. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 14, No. 2, 283-308. (2017), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS151101006T