Energy-aware selective compression scheme for solar energy based wireless sensor networks

Data compression involves a trade-off between delay time and data size. More the delay time, lesser the data size and vice versa. There have been many studies performed in the field of wireless sensor networks about increasing network life cycle durations that involve minimizing energy consumption by reducing data size; however, reducing data size results in increased delay time due to the added processing time required for data compression. Meanwhile, as energy generation occurs periodically in solar energy based wireless sensor networks, the redundant energy is often generated that is sufficient to run a node. In this study, the excess energy is used to reduce the delay time between nodes in a sensor network consisting of solar energy based nodes. The energy threshold value is determined by a formula based on the residual energy and charging speed. Nodes with residual energy less than the threshold, transfer data with compression in order to reduce energy consumption, and nodes with residual energy over the threshold transfer data without compression to reduce the delay time between nodes. Simulation based performance verifications show that the technique proposed in this study exhibits optimal performance in terms of both energy and delay time compared with traditional methods.