On implementation and improvement of robust header compression in UMTS

IP protocol overheads are large and need to be compressed when used in UMTS to save radio resources. A robust header compression scheme (ROHC) has been proposed to provide high compression efficiency and high robustness. We study the performance of ROHC in the paper and investigate how to adjust some compression parameters that are recommended as implementation-dependent according to the ROHC specification. Based on our study, we propose to employ power control mechanism already in the UMTS architecture to prevent additional packet losses in the worst cases of consecutive packet losses exceeding the sliding window width. The proposed augmentation can be seen as a network assisted feedback mechanism for ROHC.