A novel data compression method using improved JPEG-LS in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a group of energy constrained sensor nodes. Since the sensor nodes are often equipped with the battery that usually cannot be replaced or recharged, the way to prolong the lifetime of WSN becomes a critical issue. The utilization of radio communication is the main cause of power consumption. If the data size can be reduced, for instance, through the data compression, the lifetime prolongation can be achieved. In this paper, we propose a novel WSN architecture using improved JPEG-LS data compression. Improved JPEG-LS combines the data pre-collection with modified JPEG-LS predictor. We treat each sensing data as the raw data of a pixel. These raw data are grouped and collected for composing an image. Then the image will be compressed through the improved JPEG-LS. We take the user-acceptable data error defined by the user into consideration and use the error for near-lossless compression in JPEG-LS. The simulation result reveals that our mechanism can reach a good compression ratio with user-acceptable errors. We also make a detailed comparison with the previously proposed methods.