MENLO PARK, Calif., July 13, 1992 -- The efficiency of sending TCP/IP data across low-speed serial lines and X.25 networks has been significantly improved with a new "header compression" feature of Cisco Systems' internetworking routers.
Cisco is the first multiprotocol router vendor to implement the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) RFC 1144 standard for header compression, which increases the speed of interactive TCP/ IP sessions over serial lines slower than 56/64 kilobits per second.
Header compression will be available as a standard, no-cost feature on new Cisco routers shipped beginning in mid-August.
Sunil Dhar, Cisco's product manager for wide-area networking, said, "With lower-speed serial lines that typically carry smaller data packets, the TCP/IP header -- 40 bytes of address and other information that directs the packet to its destination -- is a disproportionately large portion of the packet. It consumes a great deal of bandwidth and restricts line efficiency.
"The IETF RFC 1144 standard caches the constant part of the header -- about 20 bytes -- as well as the sequential and other information, resulting in header size reduction of up to 80 percent. The real benefits will be seen in operations characterized by many small packets, such as terminal-based transaction processing, as opposed to file-transfer-intensive environments, where larger packets are typical."
Cisco supports RFC 1144 TCP/IP header compression on serial lines using HDLC (High-Level Data Link Control) encapsulation, and on X.25 networks.
Cisco Systems, Inc., is the leading supplier of high- performance, multimedia and multiprotocol internetworking products, including routers, bridges, communication servers and network management software. Cisco technology can be used to build enterprise-wide networks linking an unlimited number of geographically dispersed LANs. Cisco is publicly traded over-the- counter under the NASDAQ symbol CSCO.
Posted: Jul 23 09:37:46 1992
