Abstract—Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) became a major impact in terms of remote surveillance and data collection process. Limited power supply for a sensor node is one of the most significant challenges in WSNs. In WSNs, sensor nodes’ energy plays a vital role in the network lifetime. The total number of bits to be sent over the WSN has a significant impact on the sensor nodes’ power consumption. Therefore, reducing the size of the transmitted data is an important key to use the sensor node’s energy efficiently. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to reduce the energy consumption in sensor nodes. The proposed approach is based on only transmitting the difference between the current sensed reading value and the previous reading value that is represented by the least number of bits instead of the new reading value itself. Since the differences between the consecutive sensed readings (e.g. temperatures) are expected to be small, the lengths of the differences are expected to have less size than the size of the sensed readings. The proposed approach is evaluated on real sensors data. Results show that the proposed approach reduces the energy consumption of sensor nodes and prolongs the sensor network lifetime.


Index Terms—WSNs, difference value, power consumption, network lifetime, packet size.

Cite: Mustafa Hammad, Mohammad Bsoul, Maen Hammad, and Muna Al-Hawawreh, " An Efficient Approach for Representing and Sending Data in Wireless Sensor Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 104-109, 2019. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.14.2.104-109.