In many emerging applications, data streams are monitored in a network environment. Due to limited communication bandwidth and other resource constraints, a critical and practical demand is to online compress data streams continuously with quality guarantee. Although many data compression and digital signal processing methods have been developed to reduce data volume, their super-linear time and more-than-constant space complexity prevents them from being applied directly on data streams, particularly over resource-constrained sensor networks. In this paper, we tackle the problem of online quality guaranteed compression of data streams using fast linear approximation (i.e., using line segments to approximate a time series). Technically, we address two versions of the problem which explore quality guarantees in different forms. We develop online algorithms with linear time complexity and constant cost in space. Our algorithms are optimal in the sense they generate the minimum number of segments that approximate a time series with the required quality guarantee. To meet the resource constraints in sensor networks, we also develop a fast algorithm which creates connecting segments with very simple computation. The low cost nature of our methods leads to a unique edge on the applications of massive and fast streaming environment, low bandwidth networks, and heavily constrained nodes in computational power. We implement and evaluate our methods in the application of an acoustic wireless sensor network.
Limited energy supply is one of the major constraints in wireless sensor networks. A feasible strategy is to aggressively reduce the spatial sampling rate of sensors, that is, the density of the measure points in a field. By properly scheduling, we want to retain the high fidelity of data collection. In this paper, we propose a data collection method that is based on a careful analysis of the surveillance data reported by the sensors. By exploring the spatial correlation of sensing data, we dynamically partition the sensor nodes into clusters so that the sensors in the same cluster have similar surveillance time series. They can share the workload of data collection in the future since their future readings may likely be similar. Furthermore, during a short-time period, a sensor may report similar readings. Such a correlation in the data reported from the same sensor is called temporal correlation, which can be explored to further save energy. We develop a generic framework to address several important technical challenges, including how to partition the sensors into clusters, how to dynamically maintain the clusters in response to environmental changes, how to schedule the sensors in a cluster, how to explore temporal correlation, and how to restore the data in the sink with high fidelity. We conduct an extensive empirical study to test our method using both a real test bed system and a large-scale synthetic data set.