Abstract: In order to be able to use a smaller routing table (4) and, thus, to reduce the costs and power consumption and to improve the performance of an IP router, it is proposed to extract a destination address identifier (ADR) from a data packet to be forwarded by the IP router, compress the extracted destination address identifier (ADR) by using a lossless data compression algorithm, and compare the compressed destination address identifier with entries stored in the routing table (4) so as to find a correspondence between the destination address identifier and one of the entries of the routing table (4). Each entry of the routing table (4) corresponds to a possible or available forwarding address of the IP router, the forwarding addresses having been compressed with the same data compression algorithm as the destination address identifier.

Abstract: A method for compressing a data packet is proposed, the data packet comprising at least a first data block and a second data block, the first data block referring to the second data block. In the method, the second data block is compressed and it is noted in the data packet that the second data block has been compressed. In one embodiment, the method is suitable for IPv6 data packets, the second data block then being, for example, a routing header.