Data fusion for reducing power consumption in Arduino-Xbee wireless sensor network platform

Data fusion is one of the subsystems in data aggregation that aims to conserve power consumption by reducing the size of the transmitted data. The purpose of this paper is to present a simple data fusion mechanism called local data differentiation (LDD) for actual implementation in micro-controlled sensor nodes. LDD requires the end node to calculate the average value of an initially sampled data and afterwards, to only transmit the difference between the newly collected data with the average value. Usage of buffer in conjunction with LDD is also explored and empirical results are shown based on a hardware prototype to verify the benefit of the proposed method. The hardware for the test run is based on the Arduino platform and Xbee modules, as both are very popular in small-scale research and wireless automation solution.