Routing Explicit Side Information for Data Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Two difficulties in designing data-centric routes [2,3,4,5] in wireless sensor networks are the lack of reasonably practical data aggregation models and the high computational complexity resulting from the coupling of routing and in-network data fusion. In this paper, we study combined routing and source coding with explicit side information in wireless sensor networks. Our data aggregation model is built upon the observation that in many physical situations the side information that provides the most coding gain comes from a small number of nearby sensors. Based on this model, we propose a routing strategy that separately routes the explicit side information to achieve data compression and cost minimization. The overall optimization problem is NP hard since it has the minimum Steiner tree as a subproblem. We propose a suboptimal algorithm based on maximum weight branching and the shortest path heuristic for the Steiner tree problem. The worst case and average performances of the algorithm are studied through analysis and simulation.