An adaptive compression technique based on real-time RTT feedback

Abstract

The dynamic nature of traffic over Internet protocol (IP) networks often induce high end-to-end latency and packet loss rate. These problems hamper the Quality of Service (QoS) of various conventional and emerging applications over Internet. In order to mitigate these challenges and improve the network efficiency, an adaptive compression technique (ACT) is proposed. ACT exploits lossless data compression algorithms where compression is applied seamlessly to a packet's payload. Our adaptive compression is based on the situational awareness of a given network derived from gathered network statistical data, such as the varying Round Trip Time (RTT) as well as the packet loss rate during a transmission session. The real-time observation of the varying RTT and packet loss rate triggers the ACT compression when a defined threshold, which is compared to the observed values, is crossed. Using Network Simulator 3 (NS3), two different real-time latency reduction schemes using ACT were compared with an uncompressed transmission. The results show ACT improvement in network conditions such as reducing the number of dropped packets by approximately 30%, as well as, reducing delayed packet transmissions by 26.5% which results in fundamentally increasing the TCP efficiency by approximately 3%.