Efficient temporal compression in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is critical in the design and deployment of wireless sensor networks. Data compression is a significant approach to reducing energy consumption of data gathering in multi-hop sensor networks. Existing compression algorithms, however, only apply to either lossless or lossy compression, but not to both. This paper presents a unified algorithmic framework to both lossless and lossy data compression, thus effectively supporting the desirable flexibility of choosing either lossless or lossy compression in an on-demand fashion based on given applications. We analytically prove that the performance of the proposed framework for lossless compression is superior to or at least equivalent to that of traditional predictive coding schemes regardless of any entropy encoders used. We demonstrate the merits of our proposed framework in comparison with other recently proposed compression algorithms for wireless sensor networks including LEC, S-LZW and LTC using various real-world sensor data sets.