Cooperative IP Header Compression using Multiple Access Points in 4G Wireless Networks

In this paper we consider the usage of multiple base stations for IP streaming applications towards wireless terminals. The usage of multiple channels, coming from different base stations, increase the capacity and robustness at the price of an additional IP overhead. Therefore, we advocate to use a novel IP header compression scheme for efficient usage of spectrum resources. We propose the cooperative header compression scheme, referred to as COHC, that exploits cooperative behavior of multiple channels conveyed from different base stations. The proposed enhancement of header compression is simple which allows to keep the complexity of wireless terminals low. Furthermore, COHC does not require any feedback information, and thus it can be easily applied in multicast scenarios. We give an analytical comparison of our approach to the conventional solution and show that our approach can effectively cope with temporal bad channel conditions keeping the synchronization between the header compressor and decompressor. We further evaluate the maximum achievable bandwidth efficiency.