Adaptive Online Feedback Controlled Message Compression

Communication is a vital part of computer systems today. One current problem is that computational capacity is growing faster than the bandwidth of interconnected computers. Maximising performance is a key objective for industries, both on new and existing software systems, which further extends the need for more powerful systems at the cost of additional communication. Our contribution is to let the system selectively choose the best compression algorithm from a set of available algorithms if it provides a better overall system performance. The online selection mechanism can adapt to a changing environment such as temporary network congestion or a change of message content while still selecting the optimal algorithm. Additionally, is autonomous and does not require any human intervention making it suitable for large-scale systems. We have implemented and evaluated this autonomous selection and compression mechanism in an initial trial situation as a proof of concept. The message round trip time were decreased by 7.1%, while still providing ample computational resources for other co-existing services.