Energy efficient data compression algorithm and strategy for data uploading in Wireless Sensor Networks

For the applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the lifetime of WSN has been a very important and hot research topic. In practical applications, data gathering is a common but critical operation in many applications of WSNs, especially in environment monitoring system. In some harsh environment, deploying wireless sensor networks is a difficult and expensive work. Therefore, energy saving is one of critical issues for sensor networks since most of sensors are equipped with non-rechargeable batteries that have limited lifetime. In this paper, we proposed a data compression algorithm (DCA) and a strategy for data uploading (SDU) to extend WSNs´ lifetime. Simulation results show that DCA, SDU and DCA_SDU (combination of data compression algorithm and strategy for data uploading) outperforms LEACH significantly with prolonging the network lifetime over 32%.