Re: TO COMPRESS OR NOT TO CMPRS (please reply)

[Bob Monsour <[e-mail]>]

At 06:30 PM 2/17/97 -0800, Daniel Harkins wrote:
>I support the use of compression but not in IPsec. It should be done up
>higher, perhaps the transport level. It's better to compress the stream
>of data before it's divided into packets than to wait and compress each 
>packet. I'd rather see 50 packets then 100 smaller ones.

Dan,

The problem that seems unsolvable when considering moving compression to a
higher layer is "what higher layer?". There is not necessarily a
universally used "higher layer" in all envrironments. IP is the common
denominator and that's where the encryption is being done, which in turn,
leads to the need for compressing. As I've said before, if there's no
encryption and PPP exists at the data link layer, then there's no need to
put compression at a higher layer.

-Bob