Initial Concept of an Oracle-Structured Stream Compression Protocol for Arbitrary Network Flows

Next generation use-cases of wireless networks require a great deal of flexibility in order to adopt to the constantly changing state of innovation and to accommodate future application requirements. Header compression has been an ever present solution since the advent of wireless networks and the most current version of it, Robust Header Compression (RoHC), has seen a widespread adoption in Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks. Recent research has mostly focused on the integration and enhancement of RoHC, instead of advancing the core concept of the compression. In this paper we present for the first time a novel design that can tackle the compression of arbitrary packet streams regardless of the employed protocols and the transmitted data. We present our initial findings for an error-free scenario with various simulated and real-life packet streams and show that even with the absence of design time knowledge about the packet structures, one can compress a significant part of the streams, yielding compression gains for IP packets up to 90 %, as an example.