Lossless compression of satellite telemetry data for a narrow-band downlink

The objective of this project is to select a lossless compression technique to be implemented on a CubeSat being developed by CSUN. The goal is to compress satellite telemetry data in a timely and computationally efficient manner and achieve reasonable compression ratio. There are two main parts in this project; Algorithm Development and Benchmark Tests. In the former phase four lossless compression techniques, namely Huffman, Adaptive Huffman, Arithmetic and Adaptive Arithmetic, were implemented in MATLAB. Concise description and implementation details of each algorithm are given in the text. Next, during the Benchmark Test phase, sample data is input to the algorithms and performance metrics are collected. The collected performance measures include compression ratio, compression time and decompression time. Based on the results, it is recommended that Adaptive Arithmetic coding be selected for the CubeSat project.