Compressing protocol headers has traditionally been an attractive way of conserving bandwidth over low-speed links, including those in wireless systems. However, despite the growth in recent years in the number of end-to-end protocols beyond TCP/IP, header compression deployment for these protocols has not kept pace. This is in large part due to complexities in implementation, which often requires a detailed knowledge of kernel internals, and a lack of a common way of pursuing the general problem across a variety of end-to-end protocols. To address this, rather than defining several new protocol-specific standards, we present a unified framework for header compression. This framework includes a simple, platform-independent header description language that protocol implementors can use to describe high-level header properties, and a platform-specific code generation tool that produces kernel source code automatically from this header specification. Together, the high-level description ...