Packet Header Compression for the Internet of Things

Due to the extensive growth of Internet of Things (IoT), the number of wireless devices connected to the Internet is forecasted to grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020. This will challenge both the energy efficiency of wireless battery powered devices and the bandwidth of wireless networks. One solution for both challenges could be to utilize packet header compression. This paper reviews different packet compression, and especially packet header compression, methods and studies the performance of Robust Header Compression (ROHC) in low speed radio networks such as XBEE, and in high speed radio networks such as LTE and WLAN. In all networks, the compressing and decompressing processing causes extra delay and power consumption, but in low speed networks, energy can still be saved due to the shorter transmission time.