Patent ID: 8243757

Claim:
A transmitter for transmitting data packets comprising: a Media Access Control (MAC) address extractor configured to extract one or more MAC addresses from packet headers comprised in data packets; a MAC compression unit configured to: store a table of MAC data, the MAC data comprising MAC addresses; and provide compressed MAC data comprising one or more values associated with each of the one or more extracted MAC addresses respectively, each of the one or more values associated with MAC addresses being a pointer to a row in the table storing a MAC address equal to the respective MAC address; a packet modifier configured to modify the data packets by adding the compressed MAC data to the data packets; and a transmission unit configured to transmit the modified data packets, wherein: the transmitter further comprises a MAC data restart unit comprising a use counter, configured to delete a row of data in the MAC data table after the value associated with the MAC address comprised in the row has been used more than a set plurality of times.