Export PDFWhat Is Data Compression?
Data compression technology is applied to communication networks to compress packets transmitted on WANs. It significantly improves the data transmission volume without requiring additional bandwidth, delivering customers a stronger return on investment (ROI) from their network infrastructure.
Why Do We Need Data Compression?
Just as wider roads allow more cars to pass, higher WAN bandwidth enables larger data volumes. However, WAN bandwidth is limited and costly. The question is: How can more data be transmitted within the same time frame without increasing bandwidth? This is where data compression comes in.
Data compression technology is applied to communication networks to enable faster data transmission on WANs. By reducing the size of data packets before they are sent, it allows a greater number of packets to be transmitted within the same time frame compared to uncompressed traffic.
Mainstream data compression solutions deploy a dedicated compression device in front of the egress router to compress data before sending it out, as shown in Figure 1. In contrast, Huawei's solution eliminates the need for this extra device by integrating a built-in data compression board or module directly into the egress router, as shown in Figure 2.
Mainstream data compression solution
Huawei's data compression solution
Compared with mainstream solutions, Huawei's data compression solution offers the following advantages:
High Reliability
In Huawei's solution, data is compressed by the built-in data compression board or module on the egress device. This eliminates the need for additional devices, simplifying networking and ensuring reliability.
Superior Performance
In heavy-traffic WAN scenarios, insufficient computing power can cause latency and degrade service quality. Huawei's data compression solution uses an industry-leading compression algorithm that achieves a compression ratio of up to 30% with less than 0.1 ms latency during compression and decompression.
Lossless Compression
Conventional compression protocols may lose 5-tuple information of original data packets when compressing data, impeding refined management for service flows. Huawei's solution preserves this information to ensure refined identification, proper statistics collection, and Quality of Service (QoS) policy enforcement for service flows during forwarding.
Flexible Networking
Unlike mainstream solutions that apply only to point-to-point leased lines, Huawei's solution supports multipoint-to-multipoint networking. Compressed data can be sent to any destination based on service requirements, without requiring pre-established sessions between the compression and decompression ends. The destination simply identifies and decompresses data.
How Does Data Compression Work?
As shown in the following figure, Huawei's data compression solution follows a four-step process.
Data compression process
- Identify packets to compress.
When data compression is enabled on a device, a compression policy must be configured to define the packets to be compressed. After that, packets that match the policy are diverted by the device interface to the built-in data compression board or module.
- Compress packets.
The data compression board or module compresses the packet data using a compression algorithm, encapsulates the resulting packets with an IP payload compression protocol (IPComp) header, and sets the protocol number in the IP header to 108.
- Forward the compressed packets to the receive end.
The compressed packets are then transmitted across the WAN.
- Decompress packets.
At the receiving end, packets with protocol number 108 that match the data compression policy are diverted to the data compression board or module, where they are decompressed back to their original form.
Typical Application Scenarios of Data Compression
Financial Sector
In the financial sector, large volumes of service data are frequently replicated in batches between data centers and between a data center and a disaster recovery (DR) center. As financial services expand, the demand for batch replication grows, requiring higher WAN bandwidth. To address WAN bandwidth limitations, data compression can be configured on egress devices. This enables more efficient use of WAN bandwidth between data centers and between a data center and a DR center.
Application of data compression in the financial sector
SD-WAN Solution
Data compression also plays a critical role in the SD-WAN solution, especially when link bandwidth is insufficient. By deploying data compression at both ends of a connection, whether between a branch and HQ or between branches, the data transmission rate can be significantly improved.
Application of data compression in the SD-WAN solution
- Author： Ling Ziwen
- Updated on： 2026-01-20
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