Energy-efficient node-level compression arbitration for wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is one of the most important design metrics for wireless sensor networks. As sensor data always have redundancies, compression is introduced for energy savings. However, in some cases, it is unlikely to be wise to trade computation energy for communication savings. In this paper, a novel node-level compression arbitration mechanism is proposed, which is applied to improve compression algorithms by avoiding unnecessary energy losses. Experimental results show that the highest percent savings of energy can reach 10% ~ 30% for different kinds of datasets. Furthermore, the overhead introduced by our proposed scheme is expected to be negligible approximately.