RFC 2394 (rfc2394) - Page 2 of 6

IP Payload Compression Using DEFLATE

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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