As it has already been proved, link layer compression is very effective when used in packet networks. We believe that such compression schemes will also be widely used in the future networks, just as low level high-speed encryption is used today. In this paper we present the performance against complexity tradeoffs of such compressor/decompressor devices with reference to probably the only known. system that can work at multi-gigabit networks. The displayed experiment results show that the compression algorithm this system implements is very effective when used in real networks. It is also claimed that compression devices with throughput ranging from several megabits to tens of Gigabits can be efficiently implemented based on the reference architecture.