| CPC H04L 69/04 (2013.01) [H04L 61/251 (2013.01); H04L 69/22 (2013.01)] | 20 Claims |

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1. An ingress customer premises equipment (CPE) in a communication network, the ingress CPE comprising:
a processor; and
a memory storing computer-executable instructions that when executed, cause the processor to:
compress an inner header of a data packet by discarding at least an unutilized portion in the inner header and retain at least a utilized portion in the inner header to obtain a compressed inner header,
wherein the unutilized portion includes padding,
wherein the utilized portion is usable to compute a source address associated with a source node of the data packet and a destination address associated with a destination node of the data packet, and
wherein the inner header comprises a destination address field that corresponds to the destination node, and wherein the destination address field comprises a slice ID corresponding to a slice associated with the destination node.
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