PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF HUFFMAN AND LEMPEL-ZIV WELCH DATA COMPRESSION FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NODE APPLICATION

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming important in today’s technology in helping monitoring our surrounding environment. However, wireless sensor nodes are powered by limited energy supply. To extend the lifetime of the device, energy consumption must be reduced. Data transmission is known to consume the largest amount of energy in a sensor node. Thus, one method to reduce the energy used is by compressing the data before transmitting it. This study analyses the performance of the Huffman and Lempel-Ziv Welch (LZW) algorithms when compressing data that are commonly used in WSN. From the experimental results, the Huffman algorithm gives a better performance when compared to the LZW algorithm for this type of data. The Huffman algorithm is able to reduce the data size by 43% on average, which is four times faster than the LZW algorithm.