Efficient Data Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks for Civil Infrastructure Health Monitoring

In this paper, we present an efficient sensor data compression process for civil infrastructure health monitoring applications. It integrates lifting scheme wavelet transform (LSWT) and distributed source coding (DSC), which can reduce the raw data size by 1:27 to 1:80 while having a minor effect on the modal parameters identified from the sensor data. We have compared our algorithms with other data compression algorithms for structural health monitoring. Results show that our algorithms can achieve 80% ~ 100% higher compression ratios with the same signal-restoration quality