Magenta Telemetry Format

Ultra-lightweight binary telemetry serialization for low-resource African SME environments

Overview

Magenta Telemetry Format is a highly optimized binary serialization format designed for IoT and telemetry data transmission in bandwidth-constrained environments. It achieves 50-80% size reduction compared to JSON while maintaining cross-platform compatibility and schema evolution.

Key Features

• Compact Binary Encoding: Custom wire format optimized for telemetry data
• LZ4 Compression: Optional fast compression for additional size reduction
• Delta Encoding: Only transmit changed fields to minimize bandwidth
• Multi-Platform: Rust core, WASM for browsers, Python bindings
• Offline Relay: Support for LAN proxying through neighbor devices
• Time-Series Ready: Preserves hardware metrics and temporal patterns
• Fast: < 1ms encode/decode for typical telemetry packets

Architecture

┌─────────────────┐
│ Magenta Agent   │
│    (Rust)       │
└────────┬────────┘
         │ Collect telemetry
         ▼
┌─────────────────┐
│  MTF Encoder    │
│   (Rust core)   │
└────────┬────────┘
         │ Compressed bytes
         ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│  Transport: QUIC/HTTP       │
│  ┌─────────────────────┐    │
│  │ Direct → Backend    │    │
│  │   OR                │    │
│  │ LAN Proxy → Backend │    │
│  └─────────────────────┘    │
└─────────────────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌─────────────────┐     ┌──────────────────┐
│  Backend        │     │  Dashboard       │
│  (Python/Rust)  │     │  (WASM/Browser)  │
│  Decode → JSON  │     │  Live Decode     │
└─────────────────┘     └──────────────────┘

Quick Start

Installation

# Install Rust
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# Build all components
cargo build --release

# Run tests
cargo test --all

# Run benchmarks
cargo bench

Using the CLI

# Encode JSON to MTF binary
magenta-cli encode input.json -o output.mtf

# Decode MTF binary to JSON
magenta-cli decode output.mtf -o output.json

# Inspect MTF file
magenta-cli inspect output.mtf

# Stress test
magenta-cli stress-test --count 10000 --delta

Rust API

use magenta_telemetry_core::{TelemetryData, encode, decode, CompressionType};

// Create telemetry data
let telemetry = TelemetryData {
    device_id: "device-001".to_string(),
    timestamp: 1735686690000,
    cpu_usage_percent: 45.2,
    memory_used: 8589934592, // 8GB
    // ... other fields
};

// Encode with LZ4 compression
let bytes = encode(&telemetry, CompressionType::Lz4)?;

// Decode
let decoded = decode(&bytes)?;

Python API

from magenta_telemetry import TelemetryData, encode, decode

# Create telemetry
telemetry = TelemetryData(
    device_id="device-001",
    timestamp=1735686690000,
    cpu_usage_percent=45.2,
    memory_used=8589934592,
)

# Encode
data = encode(telemetry, compression="lz4")

# Decode
decoded = decode(data)

WASM (Browser/Node.js)

import { TelemetryData, encode, decode } from 'magenta-telemetry-wasm';

// Create telemetry
const telemetry = {
  deviceId: 'device-001',
  timestamp: 1735686690000,
  cpuUsagePercent: 45.2,
  memoryUsed: 8589934592,
};

// Encode
const bytes = encode(telemetry, 'lz4');

// Decode
const decoded = decode(bytes);

Format Specification

See FORMAT_SPEC.md for detailed binary format documentation.

Packet Structure Overview

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ HEADER (15 bytes fixed)                                  │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Version       │ 1 byte  │ Format version (0x01)         │
│ Flags         │ 1 byte  │ Compression, delta, proxy     │
│ Timestamp     │ 8 bytes │ Unix timestamp (milliseconds) │
│ Sequence      │ 4 bytes │ Sequence number               │
│ Device ID Len │ 1 byte  │ Length of device ID (0-255)   │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ VARIABLE DATA                                            │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Device ID     │ N bytes │ UTF-8 device identifier       │
│ UUID          │ 16 bytes│ 128-bit UUID                  │
│ Payload       │ M bytes │ Encoded telemetry data        │
│ Checksum      │ 4 bytes │ CRC32 checksum                │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Benchmarks

Preliminary results show significant improvements over standard formats:

Format	Size (bytes)	Encode (μs)	Decode (μs)	Reduction
JSON	1,247	125	95	baseline
JSON Lines	1,198	118	92	3.9%
MessagePack	687	45	52	44.9%
CBOR	712	48	55	42.9%
MTF	312	18	22	75.0%
MTF+LZ4	198	28	31	84.1%

Run cargo bench to see actual results on your hardware.

Project Structure

magenta-telemetry-format/
├── core/          # Rust core library (encoder/decoder)
├── wasm/          # WebAssembly bindings
├── python/        # Python bindings (PyO3)
├── cli/           # Command-line tools
├── benches/       # Benchmark suite
└── examples/      # Usage examples

Development

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.70+ (stable)
• wasm-pack (for WASM builds)
• Python 3.8+ (for Python bindings)
• maturin (for Python builds)

Build WASM

cd wasm
wasm-pack build --target web

Build Python Package

cd python
maturin develop  # Development build
maturin build --release  # Production wheel

Run Tests

cargo test --all --verbose

Generate Documentation

cargo doc --no-deps --open

Use Cases

• IoT Telemetry: Collect metrics from low-power devices
• Mobile Apps: Efficient telemetry from mobile agents in areas with expensive data
• Edge Computing: Local aggregation before cloud transmission
• Offline-First: Store-and-forward architecture for intermittent connectivity
• Real-Time Monitoring: Live dashboards with WASM decoding

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.

Author

Built with ❤️ for the Magenta project by the Magenta Research Team.

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Status: Under active development