Algorithm for data similarity measurements to reduce data redundancy in wireless sensor networks

Extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks remains the most challenging and demanding requirement that impedes large-scale deployments. The basic operation in WSNs is the systematic gathering and transmission of sensed data to a base station for further processing. During data gathering, the amount of data can be large sometimes, due to redundant data combined from different sensing nodes in the neighborhood. Thus the data gathered need to be processed before being transmitted, in order to detect and remove redundancy, which can impact the communication traffic and energy consumption of the network in a negative way. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to measure similarity between the data collected toward the base station(relative to a specific event monitoring), so that an aggregator sensor sends a minimum amount of information to the base station in a way that the latter can deduce the source information of sensing neighbors nodes. Further, our experimental results demonstrate that the communication traffic and the number of bits transmitted can be minimized while preserving accuracy on the base station estimations.