Putting data on a diet

The use of data compression to reduce bandwidth and reduce storage requirements is discussed. The merits of lossless versus lossy compression techniques, the latter offering far greater compression ratios, are considered. The limits of lossless compression are discussed, and a simple method for lossless compression, runlength encoding, is described, as are the more sophisticated Huffman codes, arithmetic coding, and the trie-based codes invented by A. Lempel and J. Ziv (1977, 1978), WAN applications as well as throughput and latency are briefly considered.<
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