Energy Efficient Image Compression and Transmission in WSN

1. Introduction

Wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises dozens to several thousands of inexpensive, resource constrained and autonomous devices called sensor nodes. Nodes are interlinked with the high energy base stations also called sinks shown in Fig 1. All of the data is transmitted, aggregated and filtered at sinks. Typically a sensor node is small device having low power battery, microcontroller, and sensor, and transceiver, hardware architecture as depicted in Fig 2. Low cost and low complexity of nature demands lead to compromise on transmission rate, reliability, efficiency and power consumption. Although WSN is widely used in military, civilian, emergency and different environmental situations, yet now it’s a challenge for us to transmit human sensed data like image through wireless network with low power consumption within available bandwidth.

Figure 1.

Sensor networks

Figure 2.

Sensor node’s hardware architecture

In distributed network a single node has not enough computational power to compress large amount of data that’s why computation of compression is divided among nodes evenly. Conservation of energy in sensor network is directly proportional to the number of bits transmitted. In this paper work we will analyze and compare different image compression and transmission techniques regarding energy efficient in wireless sensor network.