(AMDC) Algorithm for wireless sensor networks in the marine environment

Data compression is known today as one of the most important enabling technologies that form the foundation of the majority of data applications and networks as we know them, including wireless sensor networks and the popular world wide net (internet). Marine data networks are gaining increasing interest in the research community due to the increasing request for data services over the sea. There are a very narrow range of available solutions because of the absence of infrastructure over such vast water surfaces. We have previously proposed applying MANET networks in the marine environment using VHF technology available on the majority of ships and vessels in order to gather different sensor data such as sea depth, temperature, wind speed and direction, etc. and send it to a central server to produce a public information map. We also discusses the gains and drawbacks of our proposal including the problem of low rate data transmission offered by VHF radio limited to 9.6 Kbps. In this paper we investigate the application of appropriate data quantization and compression techniques to the marine sensor data collected in order to reduce the burden on the channel links and achieve better transmission efficiency.