Ant: An Efficient Lossless Compression Algorithm for IoT Time Series Data

In various applications in Internet of Things like industrial monitoring, large amounts of floating-point time series data are generated at an unprecedented rate. Efficient compression algorithms can effectively reduce the size of data, enhance transmission performance and storage efficiency, and simultaneously lower storage costs. Therefore, there is a need for lightweight and efficient stream compression algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless floating-point data compression algorithm called Ant. The main idea is to encode double-precision floating-point numbers into integer form, calculate the delta between adjacent values, and then convert the delta into unsigned integers. This encoding method effectively reduces storage costs and improves data compression efficiency. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves compression speeds at least as fast as state-of-the-art streaming methods, and a 63% relative improvement in average compression rate.