A parallel algorithm for high-speed data compression

Abstract

The Lempel-Ziv algorithm is a very efficient universal data compression technique, based upon an incremental parsing technique which maintains codebooks of parsed phrases at the transmitter and at the receiver. In an attempt to increase speed the algorithm has been parallelised to run on two processors. This requires the maintaining of two independent sets of codebooks. The algorithm was applied to the compression of various text files, and graphs illustrating these results are included.<>