Reed-Solomon codes for uncompressed IP header protection

In standard TCP/IP stack, its protocol dictates that if the header error is detected by mean of checksum computation, the packet will be discarded. Though this is a very fast and efficient method to detect `bad packet', it forces an extra channel usage. In this paper, we proposed a method to implement forward error correction (FEC) for uncompressed packet header. It is a byte-level FEC and it is going to be applied on each packet header. Our result shows that header FEC reduces the packet retransmission significantly, even with moderate FEC protection. In the simulation, we used Reed-Solomon code to protect the 20-bytes IP header and using the Options Field in the IP header itself to store the parity. Even though tradeoff exists between extra overhead and retransmission saving, our protection method can be an alternative to reduce channel utilization due to unnecessary retransmission in wireless communication.