Lossless Compression Techniques in Edge Computing for Mission-Critical Applications in the IoT

The need of data compression at smart Edge/Fog-based gateways is undeniable as data compression can significantly reduce the amount of data that has to be transmitted over a network. This, in turn, has a direct impact on reducing transmission latency and increasing network bandwidth. In time-critical and data sensitive IoT applications such as healthcare, lossless data compression is preferable as compressed data can be recovered without losing any information. However, it is not an easy task to choose a proper lossless data compression algorithm for IoT applications as each lossless data compression method has its own advantages and disadvantages. This paper focuses on the analysis of lossless data compression algorithms run at smart Edge/Fog gateways. Widely used lossless data compression are run at different hardware which is often used as smart Fog/Edge gateways. The latency of data compression and compression rate in different cases of input data sizes are analyzed. The paper provides guidelines for choosing a proper lossless data compression algorithm for time-critical IoT applications.