3.2.1 Overview

Figure 4: Compression/decompression model

Figure 4 shows a block diagram of the compression software. The networking system calls a SLIP output driver with an IP packet to be sent over the serial line. The packet goes through a compressor which checks if the protocol is TCP. Non-TCP packets and `uncompressible' TCP packets (described below) are just marked as TYPE_IP and passed to a framer. Compressible TCP packets are looked up in an array of packet headers. If a matching connection is found, the incoming packet is compressed, the (uncompressed) packet header is copied into the array, and a packet of type COMPRESSED_TCP is sent to the framer. If no match is found, the oldest entry in the array is discarded, the packet header is copied into that slot, and a packet of type UNCOMPRESSED_TCP is sent to the framer. (An UNCOMPRESSED_TCP packet is identical to the original IP packet except the IP protocol field is replaced with a connection number---an index into the array of saved, per-connection packet headers. This is how the sender (re-)synchronizes the receiver and `seeds' it with the first, uncompressed packet of a compressed packet sequence.)

The framer is responsible for communicating the packet data, type and boundary (so the decompressor can learn how many bytes came out of the compressor). Since the compression is a differential coding, the framer must not re-order packets (this is rarely a concern over a single serial link). It must also provide good error detection and, if connection numbers are compressed, must provide an error indication to the decompressor (see sec. 4)./11/

The decompressor does a `switch' on the type of incoming packets: For TYPE_IP, the packet is simply passed through. For UNCOMPRESSED_TCP, the connection number is extracted from the IP protocol field and IPPROTO_TCP is restored, then the connection number is used as an index into the receiver's array of saved TCP/IP headers and the header of the incoming packet is copied into the indexed slot. For COMPRESSED_TCP, the connection number is used as an array index to get the TCP/IP header of the last packet from that connection, the info in the compressed packet is used to update that header, then a new packet is constructed containing the now-current header from the array concatenated with the data from the compressed packet.

Note that the communication is simplex---no information flows in the decompressor-to-compressor direction. In particular, this implies that the decompressor is relying on TCP retransmissions to correct the saved state in the event of line errors (see sec. 4).