[tsvwg] Network congestion, dynamic lossless compression?

["David G. Pickett" <[e-mail]>]

Wandering out of lurker land with an idea to deal dynamically with network congestion:
If a router or similar network point discovers congestion in packets going to a specific next hop or final destination, it might divert the flow of those packets into a compressed stream of max sized packets under a wrapper protocol, so that network congestion from smaller packets and bulk data transfer can be sped up.  The speed of modern processors has so outstripped much of the transmission media that bandwidth and even latency might be improved by speeding up the link.  Lossless compression could be applied without any effect on the transmitted data.  I used to manually do something similar for bulk data flows in the 56K international WAN days: find ...|cpio ...|gzip -9|rsh somewhere 'gunzip|cpio ...", and later with 'ssh -C9' even over local networks.  Since the data is not going anywhere soon, the network node even has time to consider various standard compression algorithms, much like zip does for each file, perhaps even for each packet or IP port.  The compression algorithms, taken from the world of open source, would be supported by all nodes exchanging a supporting protocol version or higher.