A lossless compression method for Internet packet headers

A critical requirement for performance evaluation and design of network elements is the availability of realistic traffic traces. There are, however, several reasons that makes it difficult to have access to them. Firstly, Internet providers are usually reluctant to make real traces public, secondly, hardware for collecting traces at high speed is usually expensive, and finally, with the increase of link rates, the required storage for packet traces of meaningful duration becomes too large. In this paper we address the problem of compression of these potentially huge packet traces. We propose a novel packet header compression, focused not on the problem of reducing transmission bandwidth or latency, but on the problem of saving storage space. As far as we know, ours is the first method specifically oriented to this goal. With our proposed method, storage size requirements for .tsh packet headers are reduced to 16% of its original size. The compression proposed here is more efficient than any other existing method and simple to implement. Others known methods have their compression ratio bounded to 50% and 32%.