Data Compression in Sensor Networks

Data compression issues arise in a sensor network when designing protocols for efficiently collecting all data observed by the sensor nodes at an Internet-connected base station. More formally, let Xi denote an attribute being observed by a node in the sensor network { Xi may be an environmental property being sensed by the node (e.g., temperature), or it may be the result of an operation on the sensed values (e.g., in an anomaly-detection application, the sensor node may continuously evaluate alter such as "temperature > 100" on the observed values). The goal is to design an energy-efficient protocol to periodically collect the observed values of all such attributes (denoted X1.., Xn) at the base station, at a frequency specified by the user.