In a wireless sensor network (WSN), the battery is not only limited to, but is also the storage memory. To reduce the requirement of a capacity of the memory in data transmissions, a visual node based progressive data transmission protocol is proposed. First, the concept of a virtual node is introduced. Next the relationships among the virtual nodes are constructed aiming at making full use of sensory data dependence. Second, based on those relationships, a virtual nodes scheduling algorithm is proposed. In a certain data transmission round, the number of cluster members that are scheduled to transmit data is determined accordingly to the memory size of its corresponding cluster-head. The cluster-head collects the data and encodes them jointly, and the progressive memory efficient data transmission is formed. Theoretical analysis and experiment results show that this proposed method can further save energy consumption and has minimal delay compared to DIMENSIONS. More importantly, it is memory-efficient.