Improving Network Efficiency with Simplemux

The high amount of small packets currently transported by IP networks results in a high overhead, caused by the significant header-to-payload ratio of these packets. In addition, the MAC layer of wireless technologies makes a non-optimal use of airtime when packets are small. Small packets are also costly in terms of processing capacity. This paper presents Simplemux, a protocol able to multiplex a number of packets sharing a common network path, thus increasing efficiency when small packets are transported. It can be useful in constrained scenarios where resources are scarce, as community wireless networks or IoT. Simplemux can be seen as an alternative to Layer-2 optimization, already available in 802.11 networks. The design of Simplemux is presented, and its efficiency improvement is analyzed. An implementation is used to carry out some tests with real traffic, showing significant improvements: 46% of the bandwidth can be saved when compressing voice traffic, the reduction in terms of packets per second in an Internet trace can be up to 50%. In wireless networks, packet grouping results in a significantly improved use of air time.