Variational Autoencoders for Network Lifetime Enhancement in Wireless Sensors

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are structured for monitoring an area with distributed sensors and built-in batteries. However, most of their battery energy is consumed during the data transmission process. In recent years, several methodologies, like routing optimization, topology control, and sleep scheduling algorithms, have been introduced to improve the energy efficiency of WSNs. This study introduces a novel method based on a deep learning approach that utilizes variational autoencoders (VAEs) to improve the energy efficiency of WSNs by compressing transmission data. The VAE approach is customized in this work for compressing WSN data by retaining its important features. This is achieved by analyzing the statistical structure of the sensor data rather than providing a fixed-size latent representation. The performance of the proposed model is verified using a MATLAB simulation platform, integrating a pre-trained variational autoencoder model with openly available wireless sensor data. The performance of the proposed model is found to be satisfactory in comparison to traditional methods, like the compressed sensing technique, lightweight temporal compression, and the autoencoder, in terms of having an average compression rate of 1.5572. The WSN simulation also indicates that the VAE-incorporated architecture attains a maximum network lifetime of 1491 s and suggests that VAE could be used for compression-based transmission using WSNs, as its reconstruction rate is 0.9902, which is better than results from all the other techniques.