Performance and energy efficiency of compression/decompression utilities: An experimental study in mobile and workstation computer platforms

Lossless compression and decompression are routinely used in mobile and workstation computer systems to reduce the costs of communicating and storing data. This research presents the results of a measurement-based experimental evaluation of common compression and decompression utilities running on several plat-forms of varying hardware complexity representing current mobile and workstation systems. The evaluation involves characterization of the compression and decompression utilities in a multidimensional space encompassing the compression ratio, compression and decompression throughput, and energy efficiency. Different use scenarios and conditioning typical for modern mobile and workstation computing platforms are considered. The study observes a wide variety of energy costs associated with data compression and decompression and provides practical guidelines for selecting the most energy efficient configurations for each system and use scenario considered.