Low Cost Data Compression

Abstract

The large volumes of raw data involved in telemetry often require compression prior to transmission over a limited data rate channel. If the transmitter is located in a remote location, power, reliability and cost considerations add the requirement that the encoder be fairly simple, while the decoder can be much more complex. A similar encoder-decoder complexity tradeoff exists if there are many sensing stations (and encoders) but only one receiving station (and decoder). This paper describes a technique which is well suited to such applications in that it places almost all of the computational burden on the decoder, and requires only an extremely simple encoder.