Semantically Coupled Header Compression

In this paper, we evaluate the semantic coupling of header compressor and decompressor entities in our semantically coupled header compression (SCHC) scheme. We introduce the media interleave factor (MIF) to obtain an interleaving scheme for different media streams, e.g., audio and video streams. We additionally introduce the TIMES algorithm to header compression by assuming constant deltas in the headers of media streams. Exploiting the interleaving and the constant offsets in such streams, we semantically connect the (de)compressors of a framed delta coding header compression scheme to evaluate the advantage of this coupling over traditional header compression schemes using only an individual media stream. We find that our approach of semantic coupling of multiple header (de)compressors results in higher robustness for a broad range of bit error rates. We find that using our approach, expected header savings are more stable and close to the obtainable maximum savings for typical bit error rates. We additionally find that expected packet drop savings due to header compression are larger than with the traditional single stream header compression approach.