Joint Approach for IP Overhead Reduction in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks offer attractive features, including flexibility, self-organization and dynamic network creation. Due to the limited bandwidthand energy-resources in ad hoc networks, minimization of controland processing overhead is desirable. In this paper we focus on transport overhead reduction by means of header compression techniques. The potential of header compression in ad hoc networks is not fully exploited yet and is mostly based on tag switching approaches or full decoding of the routing information at each node. While the former approach can only be applied to dedicated technologies, the later comes with the price of large processing and energy overhead. In this paper we advocate a new joint approach where compression is closely coupled with ad hoc routing. To keep the processing overhead low we suggest end-to-end compression. Packet routing can be implemented by using layer III-to-layer II routing mapping. This approach facilitates fast forwarding, since compressed IP headers are not examined at every node. Simulation results indicates the transport overhead reduction of about 70 %.