A Huffman based lossless compression algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Utilization of energy efficiently has been a main area of research in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). As sensors are battery operated, battery cannot be recharged frequently in the remote location where sensors are deployed. So energy optimization is of paramount importance to increase the battery life and hence the sensor network lifetime. Data compression can be an effective tool to reduce power consumption. In this paper, we have proposed a modified version of Huffman coding (MHC) algorithm for WSNs. We have taken data set of temperature variation from a sensing node. The compression ratio obtained is up to 64.325%, 60.51% and 63.08% for Le-Genepi deployment, Patrouille des Glaciers and St-Bernard deployment respectively.