gap during which nothing is transmitted typically for longer than it would take to send 9 bytes of data thus the minimum overhead per frame is the equivalent of 31 bytes of data for many local network communications applications effective throughput can be increased with frame aggregation and lossless data compression techniques as well as with header compression frame aggregation combines multiple short frames saving all but one occurrence of the per frame overhead at the expense of a small amount of added information to permit the aggregated frames to be split apart the inventor has appreciated that there are advantages to being able to compress data and aggregate frames on a hop by hop basis using the rbridge options feature for example it may be that compression or aggregation at line speed requires hardware assist and that two adjacent transit rbridges have such hardware while the ingress and or egress rbridges handling a frame do not one hop separated rbridges are shown in fig6 while it is usually not useful to apply compression to already compressed data existing aggregated frames can be further aggregated if they will still fit within the maximum transmission unit size of the link adjacent rbridges may inform each other that they.