Designing a Header Compression Mechanism for Efficient Use of IP Tunneling in Wireless Networks

The IP tunneling mechanisms are used in various contexts such as network security, IP transition, and mobility support. However, these tunneling mechanisms induce a large header overhead that leads to performance deterioration on wireless links which have scarce resources. Header compression methods can be used on tunnel headers to reduce the protocol header overheads, independently of the payload type. Though, several header compression methods exist, the header compression profiles defined by them are not adapted to the characteristics of IP tunneling. In view of this, we design a novel tunneling header compression protocol (TuCP) for efficient use of IP tunneling mechanisms in wireless networks. The TuCP protocol behavior is analyzed by studying the implementation parameters and their configuration. Several experiments are conducted to measure the performance of TuCP. The experiment results are used to configure TuCP for enabling a better compression of IPv6 flows and managing packet reordering problem in IP tunnels.