What are the most noticable differences between Google Protocol Buffers and ASN.1 (with PER-encoding)? For my project the most imporant issue is the size of the serialized data. Has anyone done any data-size comparisons between the two?
4 Answers
If you use ASN.1 with Unaligned PER, and define your data types using the appropriate constraints (e.g., specifying lower/upper bounds for integers, upper bounds for the length of lists, etc.), your encodings will be very compact. There will be no bits wasted for things like alignment or padding between the fields, and each field will be encoded in the minimum number of bits necessary to hold its permitted range of values. For example, a field of type INTEGER (1..8) will be encoded in 3 bits (1='000', 2='001', ..., 8='111'); and a CHOICE with four alternatives will occupy 2 bits (indicating the chosen alternative) plus the bits occupied by the chosen alternative. ASN.1 has many other interesting features that have been successfully used in many published standards. An example is the extension marker ("..."), which when applied to SEQUENCE, CHOICE, ENUMERATED, and other types, enables backward- and forward compatibility between endpoints implementing different versions of the specification.
It's a long time since I've done any ASN.1 work, but the size is very likely to depend on the details of your types and actual data.
I would strongly recommend that you prototype both and put some real data in to compare.
If your protocol buffer would contain repeated primitive types, you should look at the latest source in Subversion for Protocol Buffers - they can be represented in a "packed" format now which is much more space-efficient. (My C# port has just caught up with this feature, some time last week.)
Protocol Buffers does not guarantee preservation of the order of fields in the binary encoding but ASN.1 does. It is not related to size so might not be the most noticeable in your use case but it is an important difference for comparison, for digital signatures, for simplified parsing, and possibly other applications.
Related