An overview of data redundancy reduction schemes in WSNs

The major issue that arises in sensor networks is lifetime of the network. There are many reasons which are responsible for network lifetime reduction such as resource limitations, traffic unbalancing, data redundancy, network topologies and energy balance. Wireless sensor networks are used for many critical applications like pointing out a target in battle field and monitoring the environmental parameters in dense forests. The wireless sensor nodes are deployed densely in the provided area or with a very low proximity. These nodes cannot be reconfigured once deployed and apart from that the battery unit is also not rechargeable after deployment in such critical areas. This paper focuses on the data redundancy issue i.e. closely deployment of sensor nodes leads to highly redundant sensed data. There is high energy consumption by sensor nodes because of data redundancy issue. Many solutions have been proposed for data reduction in wireless sensor networks to increase the network lifetime. In this paper, we highlight the existing solutions for data reduction. Furthermore, we discuss the solutions and analyze the performance. Finally, we throw light upon future research directions and issues after analyzing the existing solutions.