A Variable Length Distributed Source Coding Algorithm for WSNs

Ubiquitous computing has become an integral part of the modern communication system. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are networks of small devices called sensors deployed in a geographical area to sense some physical entity. The sensed information will be then conveyed to the central entity called the Base Station (BS). WSN nodes being generally deployed in harsh environments, recharging or replacing of batteries become an infeasible task. Thus it is desirable to represent the information using as minimum number of bits as possible. One such technique to perform this is source coding. In this paper an attempt is made in proposing a novel algorithm called Variable LengthDistributed Source Coding (VLDSC) which is an improvement over the existing Huffman coding technique. The results validate the betterment in the performance of the proposed algorithm.