Papers Published
Abstract:
As Internet of Things (loT) devices become both cheaper and more powerful, researchers are increasingly finding solutions to their scientific curiosities both financially and com-putationally feasible. When operating with restricted power or communications budgets, however, devices can only send highly-compressed data. Such circumstances are common for devices placed away from electric grids that can only communicate via satellite, a situation particularly plausible for environmental sensor networks. These restrictions can be further complicated by potential variability in the communications budget, for ex-ample a solar-powered device needing to expend less energy when transmitting data on a cloudy day. We propose a novel, topology-based, lossy compression method well-equipped for these restrictive yet variable circumstances. This technique, Topological Signal Compression, allows sending compressed sig-nals that utilize the entirety of a variable communications budget. To demonstrate our algorithm's capabilities, we per-form entropy calculations as well as a classification exercise on increasingly topologically simplified signals from the Free-Spoken Digit Dataset and explore the stability of the resulting performance against common baselines.