Examining Interplay of Compression and Encryption and Applicability to 5G Teleoperations

Modern IoT and networked systems rely on fast and secure delivery of time-critical information. Use cases such as teleoperations require fast data delivery over mobile networks, which despite improvements in 5G are still quite constrained. Algorithms for encryption and compression provide security and data size efficiency, but come with time and data size trade-offs. The impact of these trade-offs is related to the order in which these operations are applied, and as such necessitates a robust exploration from a performance perspective. In this paper, we assess several compression and encryption algorithms, combinations of their execution order, timings and size changes from such order, and the implications of such changes on 5G teleoperations. From our assessments we have three major takeaways: (1) Compression-First is faster and more compressed, except for certain circumstances. (2) In these specific circumstances, the compression against a raw file leads to a lengthier time than if applied to an encrypted file first. (3) Applying both encryption and compression on data samples larger than 10MB is impractical for real time transmission due to the incurred delay.