TinyPack XML: Real time XML compression for wireless sensor networks

Wireless networks possess significant limitations in bandwidth. Additionally, real-time networks cannot tolerate high latency. While some good XML compression algorithms exist, there remains a need for methods that reduce latency and bandwidth usage further in real time wireless applications. This paper presents a new compression scheme which reduces bandwidth while minimizing latency of XML data while in transit. XML structural data is reduced to format strings and arguments are sent as they are generated using modifications of real-time compression techniques specific to each data type. Methods are introduced to gracefully handle lost data in environments where delivery of all packets is not guaranteed. Performance evaluations show increased compression ratios and a decrease in latency and energy for our method compared to existing XML data compression approaches.