IP payload compression protocol (IPPCP)

With the IP Payload Compression Protocol (IPPCP), user data in IP datagrams can first be compressed without loss and then encrypted. Compression is particularly useful when bottlenecks occur in data throughput between accounts.

Data compression can reduce the user data in the IPPCP protocol and thus eliminate bottlenecks. However, a prerequisite is that sufficient processing power is available in receiving nodes for decompression.

In addition to compression, the protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force( IETF) also supports encryption. Since encryption is generally performed at the linklayer, and thus below the network layer where the IP protocol resides, such encryption occurs smoothly. Encryption protocols located at higher layers, such as IPsec, work counterproductively because data that has already been encrypted cannot be compressed. IPPCP remedies this limitation by encrypting individual payloads before they are processed further by the IPsec protocol, for example.