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I think the title says it all.

I wonder if this exists. Reasons for wanting this could be to reduce overhead.

Update: Related ideas/implementations:

It seems that there should be a standard way to tunnell IP over IP, with proper header compression etc.

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user239558
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  • Um, packets don't work like that. – Nathan C Jun 17 '13 at 13:49
  • Read this.. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4459 – NickW Jun 17 '13 at 14:04
  • Shopping Questions are Off-Topic on any of the [se] sites. See Q&A is hard, lets go Shopping and the [FAQ] for more details. – Chris S Jun 17 '13 at 14:19
  • @NickW Thanks for the pointer. The fragmentation issue is relevant, but orthogonal. For example a 576 bytes MTU is legal, and would enable aggregating up to 15 packets in a jumbo ethernet frame (9000 bytes). A similar idea is used in Tor with packet cells. – user239558 Jun 18 '13 at 07:45
  • @ChrisS I have no idea why you categorize this as a shopping question. It is a pretty straight forward yes/no question. I have updated the question to refer to the Tor protocol which proves that this is a relevant question to ask. – user239558 Jun 18 '13 at 07:53
  • Your question title is "Is there any $PRODUCT that can $FEATURES?" <-- That is our definition of shopping. Please read the article I linked to, it includes hints to help you fix your question. – Chris S Jun 18 '13 at 13:22
  • I am sorry, I don't find anything of relevance in that article. Could you be more specific? – user239558 Jun 20 '13 at 12:40

1 Answers1

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Short answer to your title...NO.

You can look into SCTP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol

It doesn't (nor does any other protocol) actually aggregate multiple packets within a packet, but it does allow for multiple streams of chunks of data to help with transmission times, although it doesn't really reduce overhead.

Various WAN optimization methods exist to help out with overhead if you mean it in terms of reducing the # or frequency of packet transmissions. Dedupe, compression, caching, multicast, etc. Most WAN optimization/acceleration products use multiple methods like these to "speed up" data transmission. Robust Header Compression and other means of getting rid of the overhead of TCP/IP headers and various SYN/ACK spoofing will cut down on overhead and latency.

You'll have to be more explicit in what you are trying to accomplish though if you want better answers.

TheCleaner
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