A new XML-aware compression technique for improving performance of healthcare information systems over hospital networks

Most organizations exchange, collect, store and process data over the Internet. Many hospital networks deploy Web services to send and receive patient information. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is the most usable communication protocol for Web services. XML is the standard encoding language of SOAP messages. However, the major drawback of XML messages is the high network traffic caused by large overheads. In this paper, two XML-aware compressors are suggested to compress patient messages stemming from any data transactions between Web clients and servers. The proposed compression techniques are based on the XML structure concepts and use both fixed-length and Huffman encoding methods for translating the XML message tree. Experiments show that they outperform all the conventional compression methods and can save tremendous amount of network bandwidth.