Differential Run-Length Encryption in Sensor Networks

Energy is a main concern in the design and deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks because sensor nodes are constrained by limitations of battery, memory, and a processing unit. A number of techniques have been presented to solve this power problem. Among the proposed solutions, the data compression scheme is one that can be used to reduce the volume of data for transmission. This article presents a data compression algorithm called Differential Run Length Encryption (D-RLE) consisting of three steps. First, reading values are divided into groups by using a threshold of Chauvenet’s criterion. Second, each group is subdivided into subgroups whose consecutive member values are determined by a subtraction scheme under a K-RLE based threshold. Third, the member values are then encoded to binary based on our ad hoc scheme to compress the data. The experimental results show that the data rate savings by D-RLE can be up to 90% and energy usage can be saved more than 90% compared to data transmission without compression.