In one embodiment of a header-compression method, a timestamp value is divided by a stride value using a plurality of binary-shift operations corresponding to a Taylor expansion series of the reciprocal stride value in a base of ½. When the division-logic circuitry of an arithmetic logic unit in the corresponding communication device is not designed to handle operands that can accommodate the length of the timestamp and/or stride values, the header-compression method can advantageously be used to improve the speed and efficiency of timestamp compression in communication devices.