Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing

The extra length of the transformed sequence is typically referred to as the overhead of the algorithm.

Although HDLC framing has an overhead of <1% in the average case, it suffers from a very poor worst-case overhead of 100%; for inputs that consist entirely of bytes that require escaping, HDLC byte stuffing will double the size of the input.

Consequently, the time to transmit the encoded byte sequence is highly predictable, which makes COBS useful for real-time applications in which jitter may be problematic.

This is done by using a framing marker, a special bit-sequence or character value that indicates where the boundaries between packets fall.

In the examples, all bytes are expressed as hexadecimal values, and encoded data is shown with text formatting to illustrate various features: