Low-cost prevention of error-propagation for data compression with dynamic dictionaries

Abstract

In earlier work we presented the k-error protocol, a technique for protecting a dynamic dictionary method from error propagation as the result of any k errors on the communication channel or compressed file. Here we further develop this approach and provide experimental evidence that this approach is highly effective in practice against a noisy channel or faulty storage medium. That is, for LZ2-based methods that "blow up" as a result of a single error, with the protocol in place, high error rates (with far more than the k errors for which the protocol was previously designed) can be sustained with no error propagation (the only corrupted bytes decoded are those that are part of the string represented by a pointer that was corrupted).