A Survey of Bitmap Index Compression Algorithms for Big Data

With the growing popularity of Internet applications and the widespread use of mobile Internet, Internet traffic has maintained rapid growth over the past two decades. Internet Traffic Archival Systems (ITAS) for packets or flow records have become more and more widely used in network monitoring, network troubleshooting, and user behavior and experience analysis. Among the three key technologies in ITAS, we focus on bitmap index compression algorithm and give a detailed survey in this paper. The current state-of-the-art bitmap index encoding schemes include: BBC, WAH, PLWAH, EWAH, PWAH, CONCISE, COMPAX, VLC, DF-WAH, and VAL-WAH. Based on differences in segmentation, chunking, merge compress, and Near Identical (NI) features, we provide a thorough categorization of the state-of-the-art bitmap index compression algorithms. We also propose some new bitmap index encoding algorithms, such as SECOMPAX, ICX, MASC, and PLWAH+, and present the state diagrams for their encoding algorithms. We then evaluate their CPU and GPU implementations with a real Internet trace from CAIDA. Finally, we summarize and discuss the future direction of bitmap index compression algorithms. Beyond the application in network security and network forensic, bitmap index compression with faster bitwise-logical operations and reduced search space is widely used in analysis in genome data, geographical information system, graph databases, image retrieval, Internet of things, etc. It is expected that bitmap index compression will thrive and be prosperous again in Big Data era since 1980s.