A WSN Testbed for Z-Order Encoding Based Multi-Modal Sensor Data Compression

Xiaofei Cao, Sanjay Madria, Takahiro Hara

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have significant limitations in available bandwidth and energy. The limited bandwidth in sensor networks can cause higher message delivery latency. In this demo, we demonstrate working of novel Z-order based data compression schemes (Z-compression) to reduce energy and save bandwidth without increasing the message delivery latency using a TelosB motes based sensor network testbed. Instead of using the popular Huffman tree style based encoding, Z-compression uses Z-order encoding to map the multidimensional sensing data into one-dimensional binary stream transmitted using a single packet. We have also designed and developed a data concatenating algorithm which can concatenate small packets into large packets, thus increases the throughput of the WSNs.