A comparative study of in-sensor processing vs. raw data transmission using ZigBee, BLE and Wi-Fi for data intensive monitoring applications

Wireless sensor nodes, as typically realized using IEEE 802.15.4 compatible low-power radio transceivers that offer limited throughput, are generally applicable to low-data rate intermittent monitoring applications. In order to realize high sample rate monitoring applications, it requires either transmitting raw data using a high-throughput radio transceiver or performing computation within the sensor node and then transmitting a small amount of information. In relation to a energy constrained wireless sensing node, a quantitative evaluation of raw data transmission using different short range wireless technologies and in-sensor processing is conducted in this paper. The results, associated with the energy consumption of two data intensive monitoring applications, suggest that in-sensor processing resulting in a small amount of data to be transmitted consumes less energy as compared to that of raw data transmission, even under ideal channel conditions.