Abstract: This paper proposes a novel and efficient algorithm for single-rate compression of triangle meshes. The input mesh is traversed along its greedy Hamiltonian cycle in O(n) time. Based on the Hamiltonian cycle, the mesh connectivity can be encoded by a face label sequence with low entropy containing only four kinds of labels (HETS) and the transmission delay at the decoding end that frequently occurs in the conventional single-rate approaches is obviously reduced. The mesh geometry is compressed with a global coordinate concentration strategy and a novel local parallelogram error prediction scheme. Experiments on realistic 3D models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of compression rates and run time performance compared to the leading single-rate and progressive mesh compression methods.