| CPC H04L 45/74 (2013.01) [H04L 12/28 (2013.01); H04L 69/22 (2013.01)] | 26 Claims |

|
1. A communication method, wherein the method comprises:
determining, by a first in-domain device, an address length;
receiving, by the first in-domain device, a data packet;
extracting, by the first in-domain device, an address from the data packet based on the address length and a start location of a field of the address, wherein the start location of the field of the address is determined based on a flexible header encoding (FHE) field of the data packet, and wherein the FHE field comprises a plurality of bits, each of the plurality of bits corresponding to one of a plurality of header fields of the data packet and indicating whether a corresponding header field is carried in the data packet; and
forwarding, by the first in-domain device, the data packet based on the address.
|