RE: IPCOMP and IPSEC

[Eric Dean <[e-mail]>]

> >comparing different compression algorithms in a stateful environment; 
>                                                  ^^^^^^^^ how comes?

Looking at the queue state of a typical Internet router, there is next to 
no correlation of any packets within the queue.  Therefore, maintaining a 
state (or history) is not of significant value because the patterns are 
random.  For instance, I rarely have two packets belonging to the same 
flow (or session) in my queue at the same time.

Now, if one were to FTP some files, one at a time, and have no other 
concurrent activity, then the queue serving the local segment would 
contain only packets from the single session.  These packets would be 
highly correlated and therefore should compress relatively well (assuming 
that they are not already compressed).

>From a packet compression perspective, the Internet is a stateless 
environment.  Now if one were to build VPN's with IPSEC, then one might 
achieve better compression ratios.

-eric