Compression of embedded system programs

Abstract

Embedded systems are often sensitive to space, weight, and cost considerations. Reducing the size of stored programs can significantly improve these factors. This paper discusses a program compression methodology based on existing processor architectures. The authors examine practical and theoretical measures for the maximum compression rate of a suite of programs across six modern architectures. The theoretical compression rate is reported in terms of the zeroth and first-order entropies, while the practical compression rate is reported in terms of the Huffman-encoded format of the proposed compression methodology and the GNU file compression utility, gzip. These experiments indicate that a practical increase of 15%-30% and a theoretical increase of over 100% in code density can be expected using the techniques examined. In addition, a novel, greedy, variable-length-to variable-length encoding algorithm is presented with preliminary results.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>