Energy-Efficient Real-Time Data Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks possess significant limitations in storage, bandwidth, and power. Additionally, real-time sensor networks cannot tolerate high latency. While some good compression algorithms exist specific to sensor networks, in this paper we present an energy-efficient method with high compression ratio that reduces latency, storage and bandwidth usage further in comparison with some other recently proposed algorithms. Our Huffman style compression scheme exploits temporal locality and delta compression to provide better bandwidth utilization in the network, thus reducing latency for real time applications. Our performance evaluations show comparable compression ratios and energy savings with a significant decrease in latency compared to some other existing approaches.