An ultra high-speed compressor for packet networks

A main characteristic of the widely used packet networks is that its switches/routers should be fairly simple and inexpensive. As a result, a significant part of the network cost is in the cost of the links. So by increasing the network traffic we can send over a given link, we will certainly increase the effectiveness of the whole network. A way of increasing this traffic is to send compressed packets. The main problem with this approach is that a very high speed compression/decompression device is needed. In this paper we present such a hardware compressor/decompressor and we prove that it can work up to the speed of the state-of-the-art network links.