Packet Header Compression: A Principle-Based Survey of Standards and Recent Research Studies

Many emerging communication applications transmit packets with small payloads, yet require rich metadata context for the proper functioning of the various involved protocol layers. Packet header compression becomes vital to efficiently support these emerging communication applications in resource-constrained environments, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). As a basis for the survey of the existing packet header compression standards and recent packet header compression research studies, we first introduce a novel set of five principles of packet header compression, namely the principles of identification, definition, placement, compression, and control. Based on these five principles, we survey the major header compression standards, spanning from the Thinwire protocol from 1984, via Robust Header Compression (RoHC) version 1 (2001) and version 2 (2008) to Static Context Header Compression (SCHC, 2020) and QPACK currently in draft status. We also comprehensively survey the recent header compression research studies in the past six years (2016–2021), following the introduced five principles as taxonomy. The survey of header compression research includes novel compression concepts and evaluations in various modern environments, such as in wireless mesh networks. We conclude the survey by outlining major open packet header compression research challenges along the five principles.

I. Introduction

Packet header compression seeks to compress the protocol header information carried in the headers of packets in packet-switched communication networks. This survey article provides a comprehensive survey of the major packet header compression standards and the recent packet header compression research studies. This introductory section first explains the motivation for the use of packet header compression in modern communication networks and outlines the goals of packet header compression. Subsequently, the basic operational mechanisms for compressing packet headers are briefly introduced. Section I-D reviews the related survey literature on packet header compression, while Section I-E outlines the contributions and overall section structure of this survey article.