Dependency Removal for Transport Protocol Header compression over Noisy Channels

Van Jacobson (VJ) TCP header compression significantly reduces TCP protocol overhead in a noiseless environment. Unfortunately, when the algorithm operates in error prone environments similar to wireless, the performance of the compressor drops to below that of not using header compression. This work describe modifications to the VJ algorithm that allow it to better tolerate errors. By removing many of the dependencies that are implicitly transmitted on the link, one is able to generate a noise tolerant VJ compressor. On noiseless links, the new algorithm shows similar performance as the original algorithm. On random or burst error channels, the new algorithm significantly outperform the original.