Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate compressing headers for relay nodes. In particular, a robust header compression (RoHC) profile can be defined for general packet radio service (GPRS) tunneling protocol (GTP) headers. Upon receiving a packet with one or more GTP headers, an access point or relay node can determine whether the one or more GTP headers are compressible and can apply the RoHC profile to compress the one or more GTP headers. In addition, the packet can include a baseheader encapsulated by the one or more GTP headers, which can also be compressed according to a RoHC profile specific to the baseheader. Moreover, RoHC compressed headers can be decompressed according to the GTP RoHC profile.