Simple and Energy Efficient Image Compression for Pulse-Based Communication in THz Band

Terahertz band (0.1–10 THz) provides very large bandwidth, enabling multimedia transmission at short distance. In macro world, ultra broadband communication networks at THz band (TeraNets) provides very large bandwidth for wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN). Similarly, recent development in nano-technology (nano-antenna and nano-transceiver) shows that electromagnetic nanocommunications at THz band support very large bandwidth too, which enables the development of wireless multimedia nano-sensor networks (WMNSN). For both WMSN and WMNSN, the major challenges are simple and energy efficient transmission, since the network consists of a large number of nodes with limited battery capacity. In this paper, we propose a simple, energy efficient and robustness-aware image compression for pulse-based WMSN and WMNSN. We investigate the system performance in terms of image quality, energy efficiency, perpetual operation in nanocommunications and transmission robustness against error. The results show that for these networks, with the trade-off of image quality, the proposed method outperforms JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF and PNG in all used metrics, for example the energy reduction compared to uncompressed is 77% for JPEG and 90% for our method.