We present a lightweight lossless compression algorithm for realtime sensor networks. Our proposed adaptive linear filtering compression (ALFC) algorithm performs predictive compression using adaptive linear filtering to predict sample values followed by entropy coding of prediction residuals, encoding a variable number of samples into fixed-length packets. Adaptive prediction eliminates the need to determine prediction coefficients a priori and, more importantly, allows compression to dynamically adjust to a changing source. The algorithm requires only integer arithmetic operations and thus is compatible with sensor platforms that do not support floating-point operations. Significant robustness to packets losses is provided by including small but sufficient overhead data to allow each packet to be independently decoded. Real-world evaluations on seismic data from a wireless sensor network testbed show that ALFC provides more effective compression and uses less resources than an alternative recent work of lossless compression, S-LZW. Experiments in a multi-hop sensor network also show that ALFC can significantly improve raw data throughput and energy efficiency. We also implement the algorithm in our real sensor network, and show that our linear prediction based compression algorithm significantly improves data reliability and network efficiency.

We present a lightweight lossless compression algorithm for realtime sensor networks. Our proposed adaptive linear filtering compression (ALFC) algorithm performs predictive compression, using adaptive linear filtering to predict sample values followed by entropy coding of prediction residuals, encoding a variable number of samples into fixed-length packets. Adaptive prediction eliminates the need to determine prediction coefficients a priori and, more importantly, allows compression to dynamically adjust to a changing source. The algorithm requires only integer arithmetic operations and thus is compatible with sensor platforms that do not support floating-point operations. Significant robustness to packets losses is provided by including small but sufficient overhead data to allow samples in each packet to be independently decoded. Real-world evaluations on seismic data from a wireless sensor network testbed show that ALFC provides more effective compression and uses less resources than some other lossless compression approaches such as S-LZW. Experiments in a multi-hop sensor network also show that ALFC can significantly improve raw data throughput and energy efficiency.

Algorithms for compression of hyperspectral data are commonly evaluated on a readily available collection of Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) images. These images are the end product of processing raw data from the instrument, and their sample value distributions contain artificial regularities that are introduced by the conversion of raw data values to radiance units. It is shown that some of the best reported lossless compression results for these images are achieved by algorithms that significantly exploit these artifacts. This fact has not been widely reported and may not be widely recognized. Compression performance comparisons involving such algorithms and these standard AVIRIS images can be misleading if they are extrapolated to images that lack such artifacts, such as unprocessed hyperspectral images. In fact, two of these algorithms are shown to achieve rather unremarkable compression performance on a set of more recent AVIRIS images that do not contain appreciable calibration-induced artifacts. This newer set of AVIRIS images, which contains both calibrated and raw images, is made available for compression experiments. To underscore the potential impact of exploiting calibration-induced artifacts in the standard AVIRIS data sets, a compression algorithm is presented that achieves noticeably smaller compressed sizes for these data sets than is reported for any other algorithm.

We present a novel entropy coding technique which is based on recursive interleaving of variable-to-variable length binary source codes. The encoding is adaptable in that each bit to be encoded may have an associated probability estimate which depends on previously encoded bits. The technique may have advantages over arithmetic coding. The technique can achieve arbitrarily small redundancy, and admits a simple and fast decoder. We discuss code design and performance estimation methods, as well as practical encoding and decoding algorithms.

There are many situations in which a coding scheme is fixed for a given channel. The data processing theorem implies that the capacity of the composite channel cannot be higher than that of the original channel; usually, the capacity will be strictly lower. This paper examines the problem of how much capacity must be lost in the most common such situations. The various combinations of presence and absence of encoder and decoder, along with choice of encoder and decoder, are considered. The degree to which coding schemes can both deliver low error probability and maintain high capacity in the composite channel is examined.

In this partially tutorial paper, we examine minimal trellis representations of linear block codes and analyze several measures of trellis complexity: maximum state and edge dimensions, total span length, and total vertices, edges and mergers. We obtain bounds on these complexities as extensions of well-known dimension/length profile (DLP) bounds. Codes meeting these bounds minimize all the complexity measures simultaneously; conversely, a code attaining the bound for total span length, vertices, or edges, must likewise attain it for all the others. We define a notion of "uniform" optimality that embraces different domains of optimization, such as different permutations of a code or different codes with the same parameters, and we give examples of uniformly optimal codes and permutations. We also give some conditions that identify certain cases when no code or permutation can meet the bounds. In addition to DLP-based bounds, we derive new inequalities relating one complexity measure to another, which can be used in conjunction with known bounds on one measure to imply bounds on the others. As an application, we infer new bounds on maximum state and edge complexity and on total vertices and edges from bounds on span lengths.

In this article we examine a scheme that uses two alternating Huffman codes to encode a discrete independent and identically distributed source with a dominant symbol. One Huffman code encodes the length of runs of the dominant symbol, the other encodes the remaining symbols. We call this combined strategy alternating runlength Huffman (ARH) coding. This is a popular scheme, used for example in the efficient pyramid image coder (EPIC) subband coding algorithm. Since the runlengths of the dominant symbol are geometrically distributed, they can be encoded using the Huffman codes identified by Golomb (1966) and later generalized by Gallager and Van Voorhis (1975). This runlength encoding allows the most likely symbol to be encoded using less than one bit per sample, providing a simple method for overcoming a drawback of prefix codes-that the redundancy approaches one as the largest symbol probability P approaches one. For ARH coding, the redundancy approaches zero as P approaches one. Comparing the average code rate of ARH with direct Huffman coding we find that: 1. If P0.618, ARH is more efficient than Huffman coding. We give examples of applying ARH coding to some specific sources.

We consider the problem of decoding a linear block code used over a binary symmetric channel with crossover probability p when the goal of the decoding is to minimize the probability of an information bit error. In general, there will be several different decoding strategies, each corresponding to the optimal rule over some range p/spl isin/[p/sub i-1/, p/sub i/]. Each of these strategies can be implemented by standard array with the appropriate choice of coset leaders that are not in general of minimum weight. We give optimal rules for selecting coset leaders in the first region [0, p/sub 1/] and the region [p/sub max/, 1/2] for any linear mapping between information bits and codewords. The determination of the optimal rule has been an open problem for small p. The rule for p>p/sub max/ is important because for many codes, when p is fixed the optimal rule for any coset corresponds to either the optimal rule for small p, or the optimal rule for p near 1/2. The optimal decoding strategy varies with the generator matrix used in general, but it is demonstrated that the optimal generator matrix is separable when d/sup /spl perp//>2. The results are shown to extend in a natural way to the case where the goal is to minimize the probability that arbitrary collections of information bits are in error. We examine some specific codes, and compare the performance under optimal decoding to the performance of previously suggested strategies.>

A class of information-theoretic problems is introduced that deals with systems in which information is transmitted through a series of noisy channels with limited or no processing between channels. Some basic questions that arise in such systems are examined in detail. The effects of ordering of the channels on overall capacity and the characteristics that cause channels to have high capacity when cascaded with themselves are dealt with.>