Techniques for containing error propagation in compression/decompression schemes

Abstract

Data compression has the potential for increasing the risk of data loss. It can also cause bit error propagation, resulting in catastrophic failures. There are a number of approaches possible for containing error propagation due to data compression: (1) data retransmission; (2) data interpolation; (3) error containment; and (4) error correction. The most fruitful techniques will be ones where error containment and error correction are integrated with data compression to provide optimal performance for both. The error containment characteristics of existing compression schemes should be analyzed for their behavior under different data and error conditions. The error tolerance requirements of different data sets need to be understood, so guidelines can then be developed for matching error requirements to suitable compression algorithms.