Packet Aggregation Based on Encryption-Then-Compression for Highly Efficient Multi-Hop Transmission

In this paper, we tackle a critical bottleneck problem appeared in multi-hop transmissions; only a single node can forward packets from the other nodes in the network to a common destination. Since every node encrypts data before transmission for privacy protection, typical compression techniques cannot be applied to the aggregated packet. We hence propose the packet aggregation based on encryption-then-compression (EtC) technique enabling the efficient compression of the encrypted data. Assuming intermittent receiver-driven data transmission (IRDT) as a multi-hop transmission protocol, numerical results show that our proposed method can achieve the lower decompression error probability than the conventional EtC and significantly reduce the energy consumption per a correctly received packet.