RFC 2394 (rfc2394) - Page 2 of 6
IP Payload Compression Using DEFLATE
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2394 IP Payload Compression Using DEFLATE December 1998
1. Introduction
The IP Payload Compression Protocol allows the compression of IP
datagrams by supporting different compression algorithms. This
document describes how to integrate the DEFLATE compression algorithm
[Deutsch96] into IPCOMP [IPCOMP].
This document SHOULD be read in conjunction with [IPCOMP] and MUST be
taken in its context.
1.1 The DEFLATE Compression Algorithm
The 'deflate' compression format [Deutsch96], as used by the PKZIP
and gzip compressors and as embodied in the freely and widely
distributed zlib [Gailly95] library source code, has the following
features:
o an apparently unencumbered encoding and compression algorithm,
with an open and publicly-available specification.
o low-overhead escape mechanism for incompressible data. The PPP
Deflate specification offers options to reduce that overhead
further.
o heavily used for many years in networks, on modem and other point-
to-point links to transfer files for personal computers and
workstations.
o easily achieves 2:1 compression on the Calgary corpus [Corpus90]
using less than 64KBytes of memory on both sender and receive.
1.2 Licensing
The zlib source is widely and freely available, subject to the
following copyright:
(C) 1995 Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any
damages arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any
purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and
redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:
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