Huffman and Lempel-Ziv based data compression algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In the recent years, wireless sensor networks have gained increasing attention from both the research community and actual users. As sensor nodes are generally battery powered devices, it is essential to minimize the energy consumption of the nodes so that the network lifetime can be extended. Most of the energy is consumed in the processing and transmission of data. Applying compression algorithms on the wireless sensor data prior to transmission is one of the efficient ways to save energy. In this paper we propose data compression algorithms based on Huffman and Lempel-Ziv techniques and compare the efficiency of different algorithms in a wireless sensor network scenario.