Adaptive Data Compression for Efficient File Transport Over Wireless Networks

Because of the scarce network bandwidth available on the wireless links, data compression plays a critical role in the wireless system design. We propose to evaluate existing public-domain and commercial lossless data compression packages in the context of wireless networking. The specific criteria used include compression efficiency, compression speed, memory usage, and ease of being incorporated into a wireless network transport protocol that can effectively address security, error control, and compression in a unified framework. We discuss the subte interactions between error control, compression, and encryption in the network packet processing pipeline, and argue that a particular processing order is the best choice among all possible combinations. The performance tradeoff in the end-to-end message delay is shown to lie in the compression speed and compressed. The end products of this Phase I project are a technical report that details our empirical results, as well as a software prototype for the proposed transport protocol on a wireless LAN testbed.