Slimfit — A HIP DEX compression layer for the IP-based Internet of Things

The HIP Diet EXchange (DEX) is an end-to-end security protocol designed for constrained network environments in the IP-based Internet of Things (IoT). It is a variant of the IETF-standardized Host Identity Protocol (HIP) with a refined protocol design that targets performance improvements of the original HIP protocol. To stay compatible with existing protocol extensions, the HIP DEX specification thereby aims at preserving the general HIP architecture and protocol semantics. As a result, HIP DEX inherits the verbose HIP packet structure and currently does not consider the available potential to tailor the transmission overhead to constrained IoT environments. In this paper, we present Slimfit, a novel compression layer for HIP DEX. Most importantly, Slimfit i) preserves the HIP DEX security guarantees, ii) allows for stateless (de-)compression at the communication end-points or an on-path gateway, and iii) maintains the flexible packet structure of the original HIP protocol. Moreover, we show that Slimfit is also directly applicable to the original HIP protocol. Our evaluation results indicate a maximum compression ratio of 1.55 for Slimfit-compressed HIP DEX packets. Furthermore, Slimfit reduces HIP DEX packet fragmentation by 25 % and thus further decreases the transmission overhead for lossy network links. Finally, the compression of HIP DEX packets leads to a reduced processing time at the network layers below Slimfit. As a result, processing of Slimfit-compressed packets shows an overall performance gain at the HIP DEX peers.