Energy-aware Selective Compression Scheme for Solar-powered Wireless Sensor Networks

Min Jae Kang, Semi Jeong, Dong Kun Noh

http://doi.org/

Data compression involves a trade-off between delay time and data size. Greater delay times require smaller data sizes and vice versa. There have been many studies performed in the field of wireless sensor networks on increasing network life cycle durations by reducing data size to minimize energy consumption; however, reductions in data size result in increases of delay time due to the added processing time required for data compression. Meanwhile, as energy generation occurs periodically in solar energy-based wireless sensor networks, redundant energy is often generated in amounts sufficient to run a node. In this study, this excess energy is used to reduce the delay time between nodes in a sensor network consisting of solar energy-based nodes. The energy threshold value is determined by a formula based on the residual energy and charging speed. Nodes with residual energy below the threshold transfer data compressed to reduce energy consumption, and nodes with residual energy above the threshold transfer data without compression to reduce the delay time between nodes. Simulation based performance verifications show that the technique proposed in this study exhibits optimal performance in terms of both energy and delay time compared with traditional methods.