Energy Efficient Distributed Data Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks

For wireless sensor networks with a large number of energy constrained sensors, it is very important to find a method to organize sensors in clusters to minimize the energy used to communicate information from all nodes to the processing center. In this paper, we look at data compression method which can have significant impact on the overall energy dissipation of these networks. Based on our findings that the conventional direct transmission uses much more minimum-transmission-energy than cluster based transmission, and spatial correlation may not be efficient for large sensor networks, we propose in-network compression and optimum clustering to be implemented together for large WSNs. Index Terms – Optimum Clustering; Sensor Networks; Spatial Correlation; Slepian-Wolf Coding; Data compression. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________