Effective Lossless Compression of Sensor Information in Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

In recent years, many visions for hitherto considered-futuristic computing applications gained momentum. The vision of smart factories is one example for these trends, which all share a common requirement: the prolific dissemination of sensor information. As wireless communication in smart factories needs to cope with harsh environments, the amount of sensor information produced by sources will likely surpass the communication channel's available capacity. This discrepancy calls for efficient communication and filtering protocols, as well as compression mechanisms, as a foundation for dependable applications. We propose such a compression algorithm that is lossless and tailored towards the requirements of the manufacturing industry. Our algorithm employs a two-step stochastic model that uses lossy compression to extract an approximation from the signal and a separate noise model to accommodate the remaining error. Evaluation results validate that our algorithm achieves better compression rates than existing approaches for several types of real world sensor data from the industry.