Adaptive header compression for wireless networks

TCP/IP header compression has long been used to send information efficiently and to improve the response time of communication systems. It is also well known that errors on the link where header compression is used can deteriorate the performance. In addition, the previously noticed high frequency of some computer networking problems can make the performance of header compression even worse. These problems include packet reordering and packet errors that avoid link layer error detection. We analyze the influence of these problems on existing header compression algorithms. We also propose an adaptive header compression that gives better performance.