A survey on data compression in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are resource constraint: limited power supply, bandwidth for communication, processing speed, and memory space. One possible way of achieve maximum utilization of those resource is applying data compression on sensor data. Usually, processing data consumes much less power than transmitting data in wireless medium, so it is effective to apply data compression before transmitting data for reducing total power consumption by a sensor node. However, existing compression algorithms are not applicable for sensor nodes because of their limited resource. Therefore, some of compression algorithms, which have been specifically designed for WSNs, are presented in this paper: coding by ordering, pipelined in-network compression, low-complexity video compression, and distributed compression.