我是否需要在我的Web服务中使用Base 64进行编码？

I am transferring messages to mobile devices via a web service. The data is an xml string, which I compress using GZipStream, then encode using Base64. I am getting out-of memory exceptions in the emulator and looking to optimise the process so I have stopped passing the string around by value and removed unecessary copies of byte arrays. Now I'm wondering about the Base64 encoding. It increases the size of the message, the processing and the memory requirements. Is it strictly necessary?I am transferring messages to mobile devices vi