LinuxQuestions.org - School project : reproducing huffman networking compression

Hi i'm starting a school project for the networking class. The subject is free but we (a team of 2) decided to do it about the huffman compression used among network protocols.

Problem is, i don't have a lot of knowledge related to these type of things nor does my teacher.

After some discussion, we divided our project in 2 parts:

Here's a basic description of what we want to do:

1st part: Explain to student what the huffman compression consist about. This is a 10 minute slideshow about algorithms explanation and network uses, performance, etc...
I currently have the algorithms and source code so this part is no problem for me. (It's C code)

Note:The 2nd part may sound weird to you cause i have a absolutly no knowledge. I need you to point me every hints you know about the following...

2nd part: (This part is optional since our teacher did'nt asked us to go this far. But as an avid computer science student, i really want to try it.)
I need to implement my own code among the operating system.
First of all, i would have to remove the part in the operating system where the compression is done and replace it by my code so i can judge its performance.
Whether this is windows or linux, i don't really care, i just want to test my code but i figured it would be easier on linux box since linux is easier to modify.
Another option would be to use what my current distro use and modify that code.

Also i'm starting to check the different protocols used in networking...
(more precisely UDP).
I'm not sure but i think UDP doesn't use packets compression as opposed to what TCP does?

What i could do is develop a program that use UDP protocol and put my compression above it?

That's it....
i need you guys to tell me what's the best option for the 2nd part....

PS: if you need me to post the compression code, i can do it. It is C code
PS.2 : sorry for my bad english. I'm not an english person