Lossless Message Compression: Improving Throughput and Network Load

Upgrading the network infrastructure to increase the available bandwidth can be expensive and time consuming. In this paper we investigated whether applying compression to inter-process communication (IPC) messages, in order to increase the effective throughput of an existing network, can be beneficial or not. A literature study on lossless compression was used to select a few algorithms to be integrated into LINX, an IPC technology, as an extra layer to support lossless message compression. The testing involved sending messages, with real telecom data, between two nodes on a dedicated network with different network configurations and message sizes. To calculate the effective throughput for each algorithm, the round-trip time was measured. The conclusion was that the algorithms with the highest rate of compression yielded the best results.