Compression Techniques in Cooperative Embedded Systems

Many of today’s embedded systems, such as sensor networks, have extremely tight constraints on energy and area, rely on wireless communication to together solve a given task. This paper shows that, for many cooperative embedded systems, it is beneficial to trade communication with computation and compress data before it is transmitted over the air. In order to better understand the impact of compression, two compression schemes are shown. Also, this paper shows that there are indeed many aspects to consider to understand the energy impact of adding compression. The general trends in computer architecture and communication suggests that compression can be even more useful in future system.