Bundle protocol header compression

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), especially the Bundle Protocol (BP), transmit data in self-contained bundles each of which carrying all necessary information to process it and route it to its destination. While this allows for long delays, link disruptions and higher loss rates and makes the BP well-suited for networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), it imposes a significant overhead in terms of the header sizes, as e. g. node addresses are denoted as full URIs, called Endpoint Identifiers (EIDs). While the Compressed Bundle Header Encoding introduces a special naming scheme to eradicate these URIs which reduces the header size to some extent, in this paper we present a novel, full-fledged header compression for the BP that can be applied stateless or stateful, i. e. without or with storing part of the bundle headers on forwarding nodes. The gains achievable with this approach are extensively evaluated with the simulation of bundles carefully generated from real-world network traffic on the one hand, and of realistically moving public transport vehicles with a traffic pattern often found in such Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks (DTWSNs) on the other hand.