Experimental Study of Application Specific Source Coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: The energy bottleneck in Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) can be reduced by limiting communication overhead. Application specific source coding schemes for the sensor networks provide fewer bits to represent the same amount of information exploiting the redundancy present in the source model, network architecture and the physical process. This paper reports the performance of representative codes from various families of source coding schemes (lossless, lossy, constant bit-rate, variable bit-rate, distributed and joint encoding/decoding) in terms of energy consumed, bit-rate achieved, quantization-error/reconstruction-error, latency and complexity of encoder-decoder(codec). A reusable frame work for testing source codes is provided. Finally we propose a set of possible applications and suitable source codes in terms of these parameters.