Analysis of Low Power Sensor Node Using Data Compression

Improving the lifetime of sensor node with limited battery is a key feature of Wireless Sensor Network technology. It has been proposed to transmit data after compressing it. Total power consumption can be reduced because the decreasing ratio of transmission power becomes larger than increasing ratio of power consumption while compressing in sensor node. This is the reason why compression is able to be used. In this paper, we analyzed characteristics of power consumption after applying Huffman coding to a sensor node, which is one of the traditional compression algorithm. Huffman coding operates in stand-alone mode in application layer, and has a characteristic that a compression ratio varies depending on the distribution of sample data. As a result of the measurement of power consumption, we have known that this characteristic affects the power-saving efficiency of sensor node.