General all-Layers combined with Efficient WLAN MAC Layer Headers Compression

Abstract

For wireless systems, it is of vital importance to use the scarce radio resources in an efficient way. In a typical system, each layer adds its own header, resulting in prohibitive signaling overhead. Several header compression schemes have been proposed to reduce this overhead. All compression schemes must be kept simple to cope with high load. Unfortunately, existing compression schemes cover, each, no more than two layers taking advantage of header format knowledge. We propose a header compression scheme that can cover all layers, from the 802.11 MAC layer up to the Application layer, without required knowledge of the headers format. We compare our proposal to a general simple compression scheme, and show that our proposal processing time is 60% faster. We show that on average, in a typical scenario, with high SNR, we reduce the header overhead by 70 bytes.