Disclosed herein are a method and apparatus for processing MMTP packets. When an MMTP packet is transmitted, the packet processing apparatus calculates a reference value from partial field values of a reference MMTP packet header, and inserts the calculated reference value into the compressed header. By the reference value, MMTP packets may be correctly distinguished and may be correctly referred to when there are two reference MMTP packets in which the lower 5 bits of packet sequence numbers are identical to each other, or even when the number of reference MMTP packets is a multiple of 256.