Limited Size Lossy Compression for WSNs

We consider the problem of lossy compression of time series data collected by wireless sensor nodes, such that it produces a limited volume of compressed data for a given amount of raw data. The lossy compression is performed in a manner that minimizes the resulting L∞ reconstruction error. Producing a bounded volume of compressed data is desirable in circumstances where we wish to know, or limit, the rate at which the compressed data are communicated, e.g., for periodic communication scheduling of fixed payload transmissions. The work is also geared to understanding the impact of, and accommodating for, storage limitations of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes. The proposed scheme belongs to the class of piecewise linear approximations (PLAs) and its performance is compared to other PLA schemes proposed for WSNs. The evaluation is carried out using existing public data sets.