Noiseless data compression can provide important benefits in speed improvements and cost savings to computer communication. To be most effective, the compression process should be off-loaded from any processing CPU and be placed into a communication device. To operate transparently, It also should be adaptable to the data, operate in a single pass, and be able to perform at the communication link\u27s speed. Compression methods are surveyed with emphasis given to how well they meet these criteria. In this thesis, a string matching statistical unit paired with arithmetic coding, is investigated in detail. It is implemented and optimized so that its performance (speed, memory use, and compression ratio) can be evaluated. Finally, the requirements and additional concerns for the implementation of this algorithm into a communication device are addressed
