Short Message Compression Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

To increase the reliability and durability of wireless sensor networks (WSN), it is necessary to reduce the size of messages transmitted over the air. One way to do this is data compression. However, with typical WSN message sizes, conventional file compression schemes are not very effective. We have proposed a scheme for short WSN messages streaming compression without delay. The first step in this scheme is to exclude non-informative fields from the message. The second step is making the decision on the compression possibility based on the text entropy analysis. The third step is data compression with non-standard use of the LZW algorithm. The network aspects of the proposed scheme are also considered. Simulation was performed to show that the proposed scheme reduces data size even in the case of 12 byte messages. In general, the proposed scheme demonstrates its effectiveness in compressing WSN short messages and does not introduce a delay in message transmission.