Static Context Header Compression
Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) is a standard compression and fragmentation mechanism defined in the IPv6 over LPWAN working group at the IETF. It offers compression and fragmentation of IPv6/UDP/CoAP packets to allow their transmission over the Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). Compression scheme tailored to LPWAN. About LPWAN. Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) gathers the connectivity technologies tailored for Internet of Things (IoT), allowing for: The trade-off for achieving these features includes severe limitation in terms of throughput and packet size supported. Also, LPWAN come with limitations on transmission modalities  since, in order to save battery, devices are dormant most of the time and wake up only episodically to transmit and receive data for a short time window. As a result, the LPWAN use their specific protocols, each adapted to their own specificities. Most importantly, they cannot carry IPv6, which was designed to allocate addresses to the billions of IoT connected devices. IETF compression standards. "In the early 2000s, the IETF produced the first wave of mature standards for compression and fragmentation:" Yet, these compression schemes cannot fit the LPWAN specificities."" SCHC associates the benefits of the RoHC  context, which provides high flexibility in the fields processing, and of the 6LoWPAN operations to avoid transiting fields that are known by the other side."" SCHC compression. SCHC takes advantage of the LPWAN characteristics (no routing, highly predictable traffic format and content of messages) to reduce the overhead to a few bytes and save network traffic. The SCHC compression is based on the notion of context. A context is a set of rules that describes the communication context, meaning the header fields. It is shared and pre-provisioned in both the end-devices and the core network. The "static context  assumes that the rule description does not change during transmission. Thanks to this mechanism, IPv6/UDP headers are in most cases reduced to a small identifier. SCHC fragmentation. When compression is not enough, SCHC provides a fragmentation mechanism that works in 3 different ways: No-Ack. In this mode the SCHC packet is separated in multiple fragments that are blindly sent to the receiver, if the receiver missed any one packet then it won't be able to re build the sent packet. Ack-On-Error. In this mode the concept of windows" is used, windows have a predefined size , allowing the receiver to keep a count of which windows or windows parts have been received, at the moment the receiver gets the last fragment from the sender it will calculate which parts of the packets it has missed and send a message describing that to the sender. The sender will then initialize the retransmission of the missing packet parts. Ack-Always. In Ack-Always mode the same retransmission mechanism as for Ack-On-Error is used except that it is not done at the end of the transmission but for each window. Standardization efforts. The Generic Framework for Static  Context Header Compression and Fragmentation, RFC 8724 has been published in April 2020. It describes the generic framework that can be used on all LPWAN technologies, and more generally on all Internet networks. Additional work is dedicated to the definition of standard parameter settings and modes of operation to optimize SCHC's performance according to the implemented protocols and the underlying LPWAN technologies:   In addition to the IETF, SCHC is being adopted in a joint standardization effort carried out by the DLMS User Association and the LoRa Alliance for the smart metering industries.