A Packet Header Compression Algorithm based on TCP Flow Clustering and Huffman Encoding

Abstract. Packet traces of Internet trafc are important tools for performance evaluation and design purposes of many network elements. For instance, packet traces can be used to evaluate prototypes of network systems such as routers, rewalls, Internet servers, etc. However, with the increase of link rates, the required storage for packet header traces of meaningful duration becomes too large. In this paper I am focused on the problem of compression of these po-tentially huge packet header traces. Previous compression methods have been developed for saving transmission bandwidth on channels such as wireless and slow point-to-point links. Here, we propose a combined packet header com-pression method based on TCP ow clustering for small ows and Huffman encoding for large ows. With our proposed method, storage size requirements for.tsh packet header traces are reduced to 16 % of their original size. Others known methods have their compression ratio bounded to 50 % and 32%. 1