User:Cmcqueen1975/Lempel–Ziv–Stac

Lempel-Ziv-Stac (LZS, or Stac compression) is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses a combination of the LZ77 sliding-window compression algorithm and fixed Huffman coding. It was originally developed by Stac Electronics for hard disk compression, and sold as the Stacker disk compression software. It was later specified as a compression algorithm for various network protocols. LZS is specified in the Cisco IOS stack.

Standards
LZS compression is standardised as an INCITS (previously ANSI) standard.

LZS compression is specified for various Internet protocols:


 * RFC 1967 – PPP LZS-DCP Compression Protocol (LZS-DCP)
 * RFC 1974 – PPP Stac LZS Compression Protocol
 * RFC 2395 – IP Payload Compression Using LZS
 * RFC 3943 – Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Compression Using Lempel-Ziv-Stac (LZS)

Algorithm
LZS compression and decompression uses an LZ77 type algorithm. It uses the last 2 kB of uncompressed data as a sliding-window dictionary.

An LZS compressor looks for matches between the data to be compressed and the last 2 kB of data. If it finds a match, it encodes an offset/length reference to the dictionary. If no match is found, the next data byte is encoded as a "literal" byte. The compressed data stream ends with an end-marker.

Compressed Data Format
Data is encoded into a stream of variable-bit-width tokens.

A literal byte is encoded as a '0' bit followed by the 8 bits of the byte.

An offset/length reference is encoded as a '1' bit followed by the encoded offset, followed by the encoded length.

An offset can have a minimum value of 1, maximum value of 2047. A value of 1 refers to the most recent byte in the history buffer, immediately preceding the next data byte to be processed. An offset is encoded as:
 * If the offset is less than 128: a '1' bit followed by a 7-bit offset value.
 * If the offset is greater than or equal to 128: a '0' bit followed by an 11-bit offset value.

A length is encoded as:

An end-marker is encoded as the 8-bit token 10000000. Following the end-marker, 0 to 7 extra 0 bits are appended as needed, to pad the stream to the next byte boundary.

Patents
Stac Electronics' spin-off Hifn has held several patents for LZS compression.

In 1993-94, Stac Electronics sued Microsoft for infringement of LZS patents in the DoubleSpace disk compression program included with MS-DOS 6.0.