The Institute of Communications and Navigation of DLR has signed a cooperation agreement with the company acticom to investigate the performance of the Robust Header Compression (RoHC) protocol in satellite links. This activity opens a new perspective to the already extensive contributions of the Institute of Communication and Navigation towards highly efficient satellite communications.
In the frame of this cooperation agreement, the RoHC protocol will be integrated into the Institute’s simulation and emulation environments for satellite communications as an extension feature. This will allow investigating performance, optimization of RoHC for satellite environments and further developments.
RoHC is a standardized (RFC 3095) method of compressing the IP, UDP, and RTP protocol headers of Internet packets. It compresses header information in data packets from 40 bytes to 1-3 bytes, greatly increasing the efficiency of multimedia transportation through packet data networks. In terrestrial systems, the transmission of IP data becomes significantly more efficient by using the header compression capabilities of the RoHC stack, which avoid the transmission of redundant data in IP protocol headers. Exploiting such a feature in satellite links has the potential to save significant amount of resources, known to be very scarce in satellite links, improving the overall performance. RoHC is now a mandatory feature for several terrestrial telecommunication systems, like next generation mobile networks (LTE), and DLR believes that research in this direction is needed if satellite communications want to be competitive with terrestrial networks.
“Being allowed to work with DLR is another interesting project for acticom and the acticom telecommunication engineers and our Robust Header Compression team,” said Gerrit Schulte, managing director at acticom. “We are proud to work with one of the leading research institutes for space technology and satellite communication systems, and this will be another milestone to prove that RoHC is the de-facto standard when it comes to header compression over high-delay and error prone links. The integration of the RoHC stack will be a close collaboration between the DLR and acticom software engineers.”
Acticom is a leading supplier of protocol stack software for mobile communication systems, located in Berlin, Germany. acticom licenses its software protocol stacks and products to a wide range of customers, including the leading handset vendors, infrastructure device manufacturers, and semiconductor companies. Please visit http://www.acticom.de/ for more information.More information about acticom’s Robust Header Compression is available at http://acticom.de/.