Structural Health Monitoring by Payload Compression in Wireless Sensors Network: An Algorithmic Analysis

Structural health monitoring is the fact of estimating the state of structural healthor detecting the changes in structure that affect its performance. The traditional approach to monitor the structural health is by using centralized data acquisition hub wired to tens or even hundreds of sensors, and the installation and maintenance of these cabled systems represent significant concerns, prompting the move toward wireless sensor network. As cost effectiveness and energy efficiency is a major concern, our main interest is to reduce the amount of overhead while keeping the structural health monitoring accurate. Since most of the compression algorithm is heavy weight for wireless sensor network with respect to payload compression, here we have analyzed an algorithmic comparison of arithmetic coding algorithm and Huffman coding algorithm. Evaluation shows that arithmetic coding is more efficient than Huffman coding for payload compression.