Performance Analysis of a Header Compression Protocol: The ROHC Unidirectional Mode

The performance of IPv6 in the radio link can be improved using header compression algorithms. The 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) consortium in its technical specification has adopted the ROHC (RObust Header Compression) protocol of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard track for real-time applications using RTP/UDP/IPv6 and UDP/IPv6. This paper presents the analysis of the proposed standard ROHC deployed in an UMTS radio link and discusses different schemes to increase compression performance. The results are based on our IPv6 implementation of the ROHC header compression algorithm and on a simple and accurate analytical model used to evaluate the packet loss probability.