Data Compression

Abstract

The advent of Big Data and the Internet of Things has revived a strong interest, both in academia and industry, in the compression of large datasets. This is because of its three main benefits:

• it reduces the amount of space needed to store data, thus virtually increasing the size of a computer’s memory;

• it reduces the time needed to transfer data between computers, thus virtually increasing the bandwidth of the network over which these data are transmitted; and

• it may speed up the execution of algorithms because their working dataset may fit into memory levels that are faster to access but smaller in size, such as the (various levels of) caches available in modern computers and computing devices.