Effects of unequal bit costs on classical Huffman codes

Abstract

Classical Huffman codes have a very good compression performance over traditional systems. Yet, more efficient encoding is possible by considering and applying techniques that treat the binary bits differently considering requirement of storage space, energy consumption, speed of execution and so on. Future transmission systems are likely to be more efficient in many aspects. These systems will consume fewer resources to transmit or store one of the binary bits. Hence, an unequal bit cost would necessitate a different approach to producing an optimal encoding scheme. This work proposes an algorithm, which considers unequal bit-cost contribution to a message. Our experiment yields that the proposed algorithm reduces overall communication cost and improves compression ratio considerably in comparison to classical Huffman codes. This unequal bit cost technique produces a variant of Huffman Code that reduces total cost of the compressed message.