DETAILED DESCRIPTION According to the invention, the structure of the data is modified briefly during the transmission.
This enables a reduction in the number of protocol data units to be transmitted but there is provision for a new step, additional to that of the known techniques, namely the insertion, among the pieces of compressed data to be transmitted; of reconstruction data.
A method of this kind advantageously comprises the steps of: the reception of said first sequence of source protocol data units, data compression associating, with each of said protocol data units, a compressed data sub-field comprising data corresponding to the compression of the data of the data field of said source protocol data unit, the generation of data for the reconstruction of said source protocol units, the concatenation of said reconstruction data and said compressed data sub-fields in a sequence of concatenated data, the slicing of said sequence of concatenated data into data blocks having a predetermined length chosen from a sub-set of at least one possible length, the creation of said second sequence of protocol data units to be transmitted, the data field of each of said protocol data units to be transmitted comprising at least one of said data blocks.
According to this method therefore, a sub-protocol of the network is therefore added, so to speak, transparently (for this network).
It must be noted that the steps of concatenation, slicing and creation of the second sequence, which have been highlighted here solely in order to make it easier to understand the invention, may actually be done simultaneously (the creation of a packet is begun as soon as the pieces of data to be concatenated are received).
In practice, the steps of concatenation and slicing are generally carried out simultaneously: full packets are formed by concatenation and the packet is sent out as soon as it is full.
If a data sub-field has been sliced (to fill up the data field of a packet to be transmitted), the remaining part of this sub-field forms the start of the data field of the next packet to be transmitted
|
Multiplexer-related 
