The Fast Fibonacci Decompression Algorithm

Abstract

Data compression has been widely applied in many data processing areas. Compression methods use variable-size codes with the shorter codes assigned to symbols or groups of symbols that appear in the data frequently. Fibonacci coding, as a representative of these codes, is used for compressing small numbers. Time consumption of a decompression algorithm is not usually as important as the time of a compression algorithm. However, efficiency of the decompression may be a critical issue in some cases. For example, a real-time compression of tree data structures follows this issue. Tree's pages are decompressed during every reading from a secondary storage into the main memory. In this case, the efficiency of a decompression algorithm is extremely important. We have developed a Fast Fibonacci decompression for this purpose. Our approach is up to $3.5\times$ faster than the original implementation.