SOAP Web Services Compression Using Variable and Fixed Length Coding

Abstract

SOAP Web services create high network traffic because of its generated large XML messages resulting in poor network performance. Therefore, enhancing the performance of Web services by compressing SOAP messages is considered to be an important issue. Compression ratios achieved by most of the existing techniques and tools are not high enough, and even a tiny improvement could save tremendous amount of network bandwidth in emerging cloud and mobile scenarios. In this paper, we try to achieve this objective by proposing two innovative techniques capable of reducing small as well as very large messages. Instead of encoding the characters of XML message individually, Fixed-length encoding and Huffman encoding as a variable-length technique are developed to deal with XML tags as individual input items. XML tree and binary tree are constructed that support the encoding algorithm by removing the closing tags. A high Compression Ratio has been achieved that is up to 7.8 and around 13.5 for large and very large messages respectively.