Unidirectional Robust Header Compression for Reliable Low Latency Mesh Networks

Next generation use-cases of mesh networks, such as connected vehicles and industrial devices, require low latency transmissions while fulfilling high reliability constraints. However, they also suffer from an increased protocol encapsulation overhead when handling a large number of messages with small payloads. A solution to this problem is to employ header compression algorithms in order to reduce the size of the individual protocol headers. Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art header compression schemes cannot be readily applied to network topologies that contain a combination of multiple-hops and paths, as the compression only works favourably on a peer-to-peer, single-hop basis. With the unique combination of network coding and header compression one can always utilise unidirectional compression with maximum gain. In this paper we introduce and evaluate, for the first time, an integrated network coded header compression solution, which we call unidirectional Robust Header Compression (uRoHC). We show that one can - proportionally to the logical payload size - double the payload delivery efficiency compared to standard IPv4 and that we achieve results 10-15 % better than that of RoHCv2 for streams containing 33 bytes of payload.