With the rapid growth in technology, the amount of data to be transmitted and stored is increasing. The efficiency of information retrieval and storage has become a major drawback, thereby the concept of data compression has come into the picture. Data compression is a technique that effectively reduces the size of the data to save storage and speed up the transmission of the data from one place to another. Data compression is present in various formats and mainly categorized into lossy compression and lossless compression where lossless compression is often used to compress the data. In Ericsson, SGSN-MME is using one of the data compression technique namely Deflate, to compress each user data independently. Due to the compression ratio between compress and decompress speed, the deflate algorithm is not optimal for the SGSN-MME’s use case. To mitigate this problem, the deflate algorithm has to be replaced with a better compression algorithm.

In this thesis we investigated whether using compression when sending inter-process communication (IPC) messages can be beneficial or not. A literature study on lossless compression resulted in a compilation of algorithms and techniques. Using this compilation, the algorithms LZO, LZFX, LZW, LZMA, bzip2 and LZ4 were selected to be integrated into LINX as an extra layer to support lossless message compression. The testing involved sending messages with real telecom data between two nodes on a dedicated network, with different network configurations and message sizes. To calculate the effective throughput for each algorithm, the round-trip time was measured. We concluded that the fastest algorithms, i.e. LZ4, LZO and LZFX, were most efficient in our tests. / I detta examensarbete har vi undersökt huruvida komprimering av meddelanden för interprocesskommunikation (IPC) kan vara fördelaktigt. En litteraturstudie om förlustfri komprimering resulterade i en sammanställning av algoritmer och tekniker. Från den här sammanställningen utsågs algoritmerna LZO, LZFX, LZW, LZMA, bzip2 och LZ4 för integrering i LINX som ett extra lager för att stödja komprimering av meddelanden. Algoritmerna testades genom att skicka meddelanden innehållande riktig telekom-data mellan två noder på ett dedikerat nätverk. Detta gjordes med olika nätverksinställningar samt storlekar på meddelandena. Den effektiva nätverksgenomströmningen räknades ut för varje algoritm genom att mäta omloppstiden. Resultatet visade att de snabbaste algoritmerna, alltså LZ4, LZO och LZFX, var effektivast i våra tester.

This project describes the implementation of an LZ4 compression algorithm in a C/C++-like language, that can be used to generate VHDL programs for FPGA integrated circuits embedded in accelerated network interface controllers (NICs). Based on the algorithm specification, software versions of LZ4 compressor and decompressor are implemented, which are then transformed into a synthesizable language, that is then used to generate fully functional VHDL code for both components. Execution time and compression ratio of all implementations are then compared. The project also serves as a demonstration of usability and influence of high-level synthesis and high-level approach to design and implementation of hardware applications known from common programming languages.