Data Compression for PC Software Distribution

This paper presents the design and implementation of a data compression scheme that can be used for PC software distribution. The method utilizes a lazy parsing strategy and a large sliding-window to obtain good compression ratio. A large window is used to read in characters from a file and a suffix tree is constructed to search for the longest matching substring. Lazy parsing is used to improve the compression performance moderately. Modified unary codes and Huffman codes are used to encode the displacements, copy-lengths and copied symbols. Although the encoder is complex, the expansion phase of such a coder is simple and works very fast; experimental results confirm this fact. Such a compression scheme is most appropriate to be used for PC software distribution.