Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks, Through Data Compression
Srod Karim · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2017
Wireless sensor networks are an ever-growing market in today's society; Smart homes with wirelessly connected and controllable devices, continuous monitoring in environmental, health care and industrial settings, and automated, self-adjusting systems in homes and factories are all growing technologies that are built using wireless sensor networks. In many of these systems, energy consumption can be a major concern; Most devices in the network rely on small batteries as their energy source. Because of this, any energy usage optimization can lead to greatly increased lifetime. Often, radio communication between microcontrollers and other devices is the biggest energy drain in the system. Compression of sensor data before transfer between nodes can be used to reduce the energy consumed by the radio transmissions. By first compressing the data, it is possible to reduce the size of the message transmitted over radio, which in turn will lead to less energy consumed. However, energy is required to perform the compression and decompression. It can be important to have a good idea of when compression may be beneficial for the overall energy efficiency of a wireless sensor network, and when it might be better to send the data without compression. In this thesis we will look at typical properties of wireless sensor networks, wireless transfer protocols for sensor networks, and sensor data. We will analyze the effects of compressing sensor data before sending it over the network, and perform experiments and measurements in a simple wireless sensor network, to assess the effects data compression can have on the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks.