K-RLE: A New Data Compression Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network

In the context of the use of wireless sensor network technology for environmental monitoring, the two main elementary activities of wireless sensor network are data acquisition and transmission. However, transmitting/receiving data are power consuming task. In order to reduce transmission-associated power consumption, we explore data compression by processing information locally. In this article, we evaluate and compare compression algorithms on an ultra-low power microcontroller from Texas Instrument within the MSP430 series used for designing wireless sensor network. We propose and evaluate a new data compression algorithm inspired from run length encoding called K-RLE.