MANET IP Header Compression

The desire for DoD communications systems to converge on an all-IP infrastructure, fueled by the increased usage of net-centric IP applications at the tactical edge have pushed research in maximizing bandwidth efficiency amidst a shrinking allocation of RF spectrum. One method of providing increased bandwidth efficiency (especially with the desire to move to IPv6), is the use of IP header compression (IPHC) techniques such as IP header compression (RFC2507), RObust Header Compression (ROHC-RFC5225), and others, to compress headers. Although widely used in one-hop cellular networks, many IPHC schemes today are stateful in that they build hop-by-hop compression state per flow. Maintaining this per-hop state per flow, however, becomes increasingly difficult in MANET environments where next-hop information is constantly changing. In this paper, we propose a shared-state/stateless IP header compression scheme tailored to MANET environments called MANET IP Header Compression (MIPHC). We show that although MIPHC does not achieve the same load reduction as ROHC for single-hop wireless networks, there are gains in MANET environments due to lack of need to build compression context on a hop-by-hop basis. MIPHC can also be combined with other protocols to compress higher layer headers.