Research Summaries

Back Data Compression/Transfer Afloat Using Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Standards

Fiscal Year 2015
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Brutzman, Donald P.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary The Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) is a formally standardized World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation that works well for all XML, large and small, providing tighter compression and much-faster compression/decompression speed than zip/gzip. Two areas are ready for further activity: broad establishment of a royalty-free open implementation for broad Navy/commercial use, along with establishment of exemplars and best practices for Navy tactical telecommunications systems.
Applying EXI to Web-based or database-structured data can significantly benefit the afloat shared infrastructure to forward data to the ship to be stored and accessed via shared infrastructure (portal server, application server, database). In this scenario, standardized XML-based data are "ordered up" by a ship's CO via web services with the periodicity required (e.g., all admin data every 10 hours, operational data every five minutes, medical data every other day, etc.) from the authoritative databases ashore. Responses are forwarded in compressed XML, stored/compressed at the teleport sites for transmission to the ship over GBS or CBSP/DSCS/WGS. Data that are required to be sent back ashore can use same compression algorithms via the RF high-data-rate links. XML and EXI data-size reductions can thus increase global Navy data communications capacity.
As previous research indicates, the potential payoff of the use of compressed XML in a data centric architecture is powerful as applied to the tactical Navy networks. It also raises several issues which will be explored:
1. How does the use of EXI relate to the emerging Navy Tactical Cloud (and related technologies such as CMU's cloudlets or CISCO's fog computing)? Can the soon-to-be-deployed OpenStack implementation of Amazon cloud services at NPS be used for meaningful testing?
2. Can EXI also work with "unstructured" data? What use cases exist for such data?
3. The paragraph above implies a data management concept of operations, delineating who is controlling the data flows and the periodicity. Does this mean the Navy needs to develop a comprehensive data strategy that is different than current information strategies as executed in the OPTASK IM?
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal