On the effects of bandwidth reduction techniques in distributed applications

Abstract

Communication optimization plays an important role in building networked distributed applications. In this paper, we systematically evaluate four bandwidth reduction algorithms, namely direct sending, delta-encoding, fix-sized blocking, and vary-sized blocking, using five types of documents including source code, images, Web contents, Microsoft Word documents, and Latex files. The experiments were performed under four representative network connection technologies. Performance evaluation results show that different approaches have different performance in terms of different metrics. Completely different results can be achieved by the same algorithm with respect to different types of documents. Network condition can affect some algorithms substantially. Furthermore, the effect of block size to the system performance (for block-based algorithms) was also studied. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.