Reliable Base Proposal for Header Compression

The upcoming wireless network generation has put a large emphasis on the fulfilment of high reliability constraints. Nonetheless, the trade- off between these and other network aspects, mainly delay and bandwidth, is a constant optimisational question and a tough challenge. The various employed protocols add certain encapsulation overheads, which albeit necessary, however could potentially be excessive, such as in the case of various IoT, and similar applications with small payloads. Header compression aims to reduce these headers, but a general problem still plagues the standards since their introduction to loss-prone wireless networks, which is the issue of lost context (re)initialisation packets that can make the compression upstart and the transmission of major changes unreliable, slow and costly. In this paper we propose a solution that circumvents some concerns of traditional header compression context initialisation by the employment of network coding, which we call the reliable base proposal technique. This provides a finely tunable method for balancing reliability and delay of decompression with bandwidth gain. Our results show that both compression gain and reliability can be increased over the previous standards.