Coding Techniques for Resilient Packet Header Compression Approved by Supervisory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to my advisor Dr. Aria Nosratinia. Without his unwavering patience and confidence in me, this thesis would not have been possible. For the past two years being a part of his research group has been an exciting challenge and privilege. I also thank Dr. Andrea Fumagalli and Dr. Hlaing Minn to agree on serving my supervisory committee. Doing research at MCL also gave me the opportunity to make many friends. Todd, you all for your help. In particular, I would like to thank Ramakrishna and Harsh for providing me with software for my experiments. It has been an absolute pleasure working with all of you guys. I cannot express in words how deeply I feel about the support and confidence my parents have shown in me over the years. Everything seems insignificant compared to the sacrifices they have made to educate their children. Thank you, thank you very much. Also I express my heartfelt thanks to my girlfriend Mangala for her love, support and understanding. Thank you for enduring my absence. Finally, I would like to thank my friends, cricket buddies and especially my roommates. Living away from home and family is never a joy; thank you guys for the good times. Network traffic statistics show that, because shorter packets predominate in many applications , headers impose a considerable overhead. But the header content is largely repetitive, thus in the past 15 years many packet header compression techniques have been proposed and studied. Header compression is based on differential methods, which introduces error propagation and leads to problems, e.g., in wireless links. This work presents error-resilient header compression by using forward error correction (FEC), which can significantly improve the throughput of header compression in both uni-directional and bi-directional links. Well-known error correcting codes such as Reed-Solomon and convolutional codes are utilized in this direction. For delay-sensitive applications we also propose a delay-limited interleaver design. The proposed methods are versatile and can work with pre-existing header compression schemes. Simulations demonstrate advantages of the proposed system in terms of packet loss rates, throughput and delay. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements v Abstract vi List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1. 3.7 Performance of RS codes over the uni-directional bursty channel with B L = 5 28 3.8 Performance of RS codes over the uni-directional bursty channel with B …