Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing

—Byte stuffing is a process that encodes a sequence of data bytes that may contain ‘illegal’ or ‘reserved’ values, using a potentially longer sequence that contains no occurrences of these values. The extra length is referred to here as the overhead of the encoding. To date, byte stuffing algorithms, such as those used by SLIP, PPP and AX.25, have been designed to incur low average overhead, but little effort has been made to minimize their worstcase overhead. However, there are some increasingly popular network devices whose performance is determined more by the worst case than by the average case. For example, the transmission time for ISM-band packet radio transmitters is strictly limited by FCC regulation. To adhere to this regulation, the current practice is to set the maximum packet size artificially low so that no packet, even after worst-case overhead, can exceed the transmission time limit. This paper presents a new byte stuffing algorithm, called Consistent Overhead...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Stuart Cheshire, Mary Baker
• Keywords: Byte, Byte Stuffing Algorithms, Communications, SIGCOMM 1997, Worst-case Overhead