Coded addresses in multi-hop wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime improvement of multi-hop wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem. In fact, the network lifetime can be extended by energy saving techniques such as energy-efficient protocols. However, one of the most promising research directions to overcome the network lifetime problem is the compression. Indeed, compression consists in minimizing the size of packets transmitted by the sensors. Nevertheless, compression deals only with data while addresses compression is not considered. In this work, Slepian-Wolf source coding and address allocation are used jointly in multi-hop wireless sensor networks to reduce the size of the transmitted addresses. Our simulation findings demonstrate significant gains in network lifetime, while keeping energy dissipation at very satisfactory levels even in multi-hop networks.