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Re: compression and encryption
I generally agree with Steve's analysis showing the intractability of
doing compression at the IPSEC layer. Especially with the widespread
use of application-level compression in the Internet, the lack of
compression in IPSEC just doesn't strike me as a serious problem.
I think VJ header compression is not nearly as important as once was,
for several reasons:
1. Van originally designed his scheme when he had a 2400bps dialup
modem and read his netnews over a telnet session. Today if you have
14.4kb/s, you're behind the curve.
2. Many of the things you used to do over a telnet/rlogin type session
(where header overhead is most significant) are now done with
intelligent local agents. Examples include email, netnews and web
surfing. Most of these agents speak various client/server protocols
over the wire with much larger average packet sizes as compared to
character-at-a-time telnet. This makes header overhead much less
significant.
So while there's no reason to take out VJ header compression now that it
exists, I no longer consider it essential.
Phil
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