A Time Efficient Approach to Data Compression for LZW Algorithm

This paper introduces an efficient data compression algorithm, which performs better then available LZW algorithm. Here, we propose a modified way to update the dictionary for LZW algorithm. First, we identify the different characters in the file and count the number of times each character is repeated. Then we arrange them in descending order based on the repetition count, and delete all remaining unused characters from the dictionary till 255. The proposed algorithm has shown to reduce the compression time by almost six times of the original time taken by conventional Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm. The Proposed algorithm can compress data faster than conventional LZW in a single level-based operation, so it leaves an opportunity for future research by adding one more level of compression to further improve the compression rate. Its time performance in single level is better than conventional LZW.