The Effects of XML Compression on SOAP Performance

XML is the foundation of the SOAP protocol, and in turn, Web Service communication. This self-descriptive textual format for structured data is renowned to be verbose. This verbosity can cause problems due to communication and processing overhead in resource-constrained environments (e.g., small wireless devices). In this paper, we compare different binary representations of XML documents. To this end, we propose a multifaceted and reusable test suite based on real-world scenarios. Our main result is that only simple XML compression methods are suitable for a wide range of scenarios. While these simple methods do not match the compression ratios of more specialized ones, they are still competitive in most scenarios. We also show that there are scenarios that none of the evaluated methods can deal with efficiently.

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