Efficient Data Communication Using Dynamic Switching of Compression Method

As a means for high-speed communication on the network with limited communication bandwidth such as WAN or wireless LAN environment, we can use the online high-speed data compression/decompression method. Since it is necessary to reduce the transfer time including the time of the data compression process, it is difficult to adopt the advanced but time-consuming compression algorithm. However, it is possible to mitigate this constraint, if we take advantage of the multiple cores of multi-core processor that is significantly spread in recent years. By performing data transfer and compression on different processor cores in parallel, it is possible to use the advanced algorithm for higher compression ratio than conventional online algorithm, as long as the compression process catches up with the process of data transmission to network. Thus, it is possible to transfer the data faster, by transferring the more compressed data than conventional. In this paper, we investigate the method of highly efficient data transfer in the network of limited communication bandwidth. The method tries to select the highest compression algorithm dynamically as long as it catches up with the actual speed of sending data, in order to fully utilize the network bandwidth. Our evaluation result shows that the proposed method can select the nearly best compression method, and achieve up to 3 times speed-up maximum in various situations where both communication bandwidth and input data vary with time.