Feasibility of SNMP OID compression

Simple network management protocol (SNMP) object identifier (OID) compression can improve bandwidth usage and response time. The current literature includes several OID compression algorithms to reduce redundancy in SNMP protocol data units (PDUs). The overhead of OID compression could outweigh the benefits it offers if its tradeoffs are not well understood. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the OID compression as a viable feature for SNMP libraries. This is done by adding an OID compression algorithm to Net-SNMP, which is one of the popular open source implementations of the SNMP framework. Change to image size, lines of code added, complexity of compression code, the effect of compression on response time, and testing effort required are the parameters presented to understand the viability of OID compression.