Effnet EHC™

Effnet provides a highly portable, efficient and fully compliant software implementation of Ethernet Header Compression (EHC) technology which is based on the EHC protocol introduced in 3GPP TS 38.323 (ETSI TS 138 323) Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) specification Release 16.

The need for an Ethernet compression mechanism was identified during the NR Industrial IoT work item for NR Rel 16. A separate Study item for this was made, and in the RAN#81 plenary meeting, the revised Study item on NR Industrial Internet of Things was approved. One of its important objectives for the time sensitive network (TSN) enhancement defined in RP-182090 is Ethernet Header Compression, EHC.

In the Study item it was observed that for typical Ethernet data packets for industrial applications, where the Ethernet headers are mostly static and the payloads are often small, the gain from the [Ethernet] header compression is significant. In industrial applications where IP communication is used on top of Ethernet, then ROHC will complement EHC to achieve the highest possible compression efficiency, leading to reducing transmission overhead and time, especially in wireless networks with high error probabilities and scarce resources.

General features

  • 100% transparent compression
  • Lightweight implementation suitable for low-end devices
  • Highly portable ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (C99) code with no operating system dependencies
  • Platform, endianness and byte-order independent
  • Highly configurable
  • Highly modular with external memory management
  • Multi-threading support

Services

Effnet provides support and maintenance services covering problem reporting, bug fixes, updates, training, consulting and integration. A sample application code together with detailed documentation covering well defined and easy to use API is provided to speed up the process of integration.