Green Traffic Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks

Emerging multi-hop machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that likely support a large number of wireless devices create new challenges for spectrum scarcity and energy efficiency. In parallel to pursuing physical layer transmission efficiency, traffic compression to reduce required wireless transmissions suggests a new paradigm of wireless networks. Utilizing the natures of broadcasting and information collection in wireless sensor or machine networks, cognitive traffic compression can be facilitated by our proposed optimal fusion rules and topology compression algorithm. Therefore, only the necessary and connected sensors/machines in M2M networks are required to transmit, to achieve the desirable distortion of information collection (i.e. detection/estimation error). In other words, given the desirable distortion, the number of sensors to transmit, or equivalently the total energy consumption, serves our purpose of energy efficiency for end-to-end networking. Numerical results show successful compression of total network traffic to significantly enhance networking energy efficiency.