Enabling Compression in Tiny Wireless Sensor Nodes

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network composed of sensor nodes communicating among themselves and deployed in large scale (from tens to thousands) for applications such as environmental, habitat and structural monitoring, disaster management, equipment diagnostic, alarm detection, and target classification. In WSNs, typically, sensor nodes are randomly distributed over the area under observation with very high density. Each node is a small device able to collect information from the surrounding environment through one or more sensors, to elaborate this information locally and to communicate it to a data collection centre called sink or base station. WSNs are currently an active research area mainly due to the potential of their applications. However, the deployment of a large scale WSN still requires solutions to a number of technical challenges that stem primarily from the features of the sensor nodes such as limited computational power, reduced communication bandwidth and small storage capacity. Further, since sensor nodes are typically powered by batteries with a limited capacity, energy is a primary constraint in the design and deployment of WSNs. Datasheets of commercial sensor nodes show that data communication is very expensive in terms of energy consumption, whereas data processing consumes significantly less: the energy cost of receiving or transmitting a single bit of information is approximately the same as that required by the processing unit for executing a thousand operations. On the other hand, the energy consumption of the sensing unit depends on the specific sensor type. In several cases, however, it is negligible with respect to the energy consumed by the communication unit and sometimes also by the processing unit. Thus, to extend the lifetime of a WSN, most of the energy conservation schemes proposed in the literature aim to minimize the energy consumption of the communication unit (Croce et al., 2008). To achieve this objective, two main approaches have been followed: power saving through duty cycling and in-network processing. Duty cycling schemes define coordinated sleep/wakeup schedules among nodes in the network. A detailed description of these techniques applied to WSNs can be found in (Anastasi et al., 2009). On the other hand, in-network processing consists in reducing the amount of information to be transmitted by means of aggregation (Boulis et al., 2003) (Croce et al., 2008) (Di Bacco et al., 2004) (Fan et al., 2007) 1