A comparison of data serialization formats for optimal efficiency on a mobile platform

Because of the increase in easily obtainable internet-connected mobile devices and their unique characteristics, choosing the proper data serialization format has become increasingly difficult. These devices are resource scarce and bandwidth limited. In this paper, we compare four different data serialization formats with an emphasis on serialization speed, data size, and usability. The selected serialization formats include XML, JSON, Thrift, and ProtoBuf. XML and JSON are the most well known text-based data formats, while ProtoBuf and Thrift are relatively new binary serialization formats. These data serialization formats are tested on an Android device using both text-heavy and number-heavy objects.