Hardware-Accelerated Data Compression in Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract. In wireless sensor networks, the actual transmission of col-lected data is often the most energy-consuming operation. Frequently, it is worthwhile to spend energy aggregating the raw sensor data on the node to reduce the transmission effort. For many cases, lossless data com-pression can be employed as a general data aggregation method, as in-compressible data (noise) generally does not carry any information worth transmitting. Nevertheless, the energy spent for data compression must be traded-off against the energy saved for transmitting the compressed data. In this work, sensor data of two real-life applications is compressed using a hardware-accelerator of the heterogeneous HaLOEWEn sensor node. The benefits of providing the node with a reconfigurable compute unit is demonstrated by comparing its energy consumption with that of of a purely software-based implementation