New IP/ROHC application!
Written for rohc by Didier Barvaux on 2013-04-02
We are proud to announce a new application. It's a tunnel application similar the ROHC/UDP tunnel of the ROHC library, but designed for production!
=== Origins ===
The tunnel application was designed and developed by Viveris Technologies [2].
Viveris Technologies is a French company working in the IT field. The company provides to the ROHC project the skills of its engineering teams in the telecommunications, network and Linux fields.
Viveris Technologies proposes the knowledge and expertise gained on the ROHC library to companies and people that are interested in network header compression, but do not have the skills or the time to integrate the ROHC mechanisms in their application or infrastructure.
Kudos to Alexandre Chataignon [3] that wrote the code at Viveris, and to Viveris Technologies for publishing the code under the GPLv2+ license!
=== Features ===
The application is based on ROHC, of course. It encapsulates the ROHC packets in IP packets (to avoid the UDP overhead). Because of that it is named IP/ROHC (iprohc in code).
In addition, we implemented frame packing: several ROHC packets are put together in one single IP header to reduce the tunnel overhead even more [4].
=== Software architecture ===
The IP/ROHC application is divided into two parts: the server and the client. The server part handles sessions with several clients simultaneously.
The client and the server establish two communication channels between them: the control channel that uses TCP for reliability, and the data channel that uses UDP for efficiency.
The client establishes and closes a session on the control channel. The client transmits compressed data on the data channel. The control channel is authenticated and encrypted with TLS.
Both the client and the server uses TUN interfaces to fake network interfaces.
=== Supported platforms ===
The application was tested under Linux, and more especially Debian Squeeze, CentOS 5, Arch, and Gentoo. It should however work on every Linux distributions. If not, report a bug and/or send a patch.
The application requires libyaml, gnutls, and ROHC. A RPM spec and a Debian package are available in the source tree.
=== Code / development ===
The IP/ROHC application is hosted on the same project as the ROHC library. The website, the wiki, the bugtracker, and the mailing list will shared among the two code bases.
The code of the tunnel application is however not located within ROHC library. There is a dedicated Bazaar repository for it [1]. This way, the 2 applications will evolve at their own rate.
[1] IP/ROHC code: https:/
[2] Viveris Technologies: http://
[3] Alexandre Chataignon: https:/
[4] IP encapsulation means less overhead, but it also means that NAT
gateways won't handle it well in many cases.
