Generic Stream Encapsulation

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (September 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Generic Stream Encapsulation, or GSE for short, is a Data link layer protocol defined by DVB. GSE provides means to carry packet oriented protocols such as IP on top of uni-directional physical layers such as DVB-S2, DVB-T2 and DVB-C2.

GSE provides additional features beyond the pure carriage of IP datagrams that increase the protocol flexibility and applicability. Some key GSE functions/characteristics are:

• Support for multi-protocol encapsulation (IPv4, IPv6, MPEG, ATM, Ethernet, 802.1pQ VLANs, etc.)
• Transparency to network layer functions, including IP encryption and IP header compression.
• Support of several addressing modes. In addition to the 6-byte MAC address (including multicast and unicast), it supports a MAC address-less mode, and an optional 3-byte address mode.
• A mechanism for fragmenting IP datagrams or other network layer packets over Base Band frames to support ACM/VCM.
• Support for hardware filtering.
• Extensibility: additional link protocols can be included through specific protocol type values (e.g. Layer 2 security, IP Header Compression, etc.).