Data Compression in Sensor Networks

Synonyms

Correlated data collection; Data suppression; Distributed source coding

Definition

Data compression issues arise in a sensor network when designing protocols for efficiently collecting all data observed by the sensor nodes at an Internet-connected base station. More formally, let X_i denote an attribute being observed by a node in the sensor network – X_i may be an environmental property being sensed by the node (e.g., temperature), or it may be the result of an operation on the sensed values (e.g., in an anomaly detection application, the sensor node may continuously evaluate a filter such as “temperature > 100” on the observed values). The goal is to design an energy-efficient protocol to periodically collect the observed values of all such attributes (denoted X₁,…,X_n) at the base station, at a frequency specified by the user. In many cases, a bounded-error approximation might be acceptable, i.e., the reported values may only be required to be within ± ∈of the observed...