Packet Header Compression in the Internet of Things

摘要

Because of the massive development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the quantity of remote devices associated with the Internet is estimated to touch 26 billion by 2020. This will challenge both the energy proficiency of wireless battery fuelled gadgets and the bandwidth capacities of wireless networks. One answer for both difficulties could be to use packet header compression. The primary reason for having header compression is that there is a huge amount of redundancy in the header fields of the packets owned by the same packet stream. Hence, there is a need to reduce this redundancy to make the best use of the available bandwidth so as to make the processing of data faster. This can be done by bringing the compressor and decompressor in sync with each other. To reduce the header size considerably, sending static/fixed information only initially followed by making predictions and the use of dependencies for rest of the fields fructifies. This paper reviews various existing header compression schemes, identifies the need for Robust Header Compression (ROHC) scheme and introduces the header compression of 6LoWPAN. 6LoWPAN provides header compression mechanisms to reduce the size of upper layer headers. 6LoWPAN header compression mechanisms can be used to compress the security headers as well.