A Tunstall based lossless compression algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

As the technology progressing, WSN (Wireless sensor network) become a suitable choice for data gathering and monitoring applications. Power consumption is an important consideration for the design of sensor network. As the WSN is powered by small batteries and deployed in remote location where it is not possible to charge and change these batteries, so it is very important to reduce the energy consumption, which results in increase in life time of sensor network. The communication unit on a WSN is main energy consumer, so a data compression technique is required to reduce the data exchange among the various nodes in network and hence result in power saving Due to various constraints in WSN like low memory, less processing speed and limited capacity batteries, we require a lightweight compression scheme which full fills these constraints. In this paper we are presenting the lossless data compression scheme, which follows the methodology of Tunstall codes for data compression of text. The best part of above designed algorithm is that it uses the same length code for any stream of applied input in contrast to the variable length codes introduced previously. For the above algorithm we obtained desired compression ratio as listed below. Comparison is done with existing data compression algorithm in WSN to validate the result.