IoT Data Compression: Sensor-Agnostic Approach

Management of bulk sensor data is one of the challenging problems in the development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. High volume of sensor data induces for optimal implementation of appropriate sensor data compression technique to deal with the problem of energy-efficient transmission, storage space optimization for tiny sensor devices, and cost-effective sensor analytics. The compression performance to realize significant gain in processing high volume sensor data cannot be attained by conventional lossy compression methods, which are less likely to exploit the intrinsic unique contextual characteristics of sensor data. In this paper, we propose SensCompr, a dynamic lossy compression method specific for sensor datasets and it is easily realizable with standard compression methods. Senscompr leverages robust statistical and information theoretic techniques and does not require specific physical modeling. It is an information-centric approach that exhaustively analyzes the inherent properties of sensor data for extracting the embedded useful information content and accordingly adapts the parameters of compression scheme to maximize compression gain while optimizing information loss. Senscompr is successfully applied to compress large sets of heterogeneous real sensor datasets like ECG, EEG, smart meter, accelerometer. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time 'sensor information content'-centric dynamic compression technique is proposed and implemented particularly for IoT-applications and this method is independent to sensor data types.