A network employing redundancy-aware hardware may actively allocate decompression tasks among different devices along a single path to improve data throughput. The allocation can be performed by a hash or similar process operating on a header of the packets to distribute caching according to predefined ranges of hash values without significant additional communication overhead. Decompression of packets may be similarly distributed by marking shim values to match the earlier caching of antecedent packets. Nodes may use coordinated cache sizes and organizations to eliminate the need for separate cache protocol communications.