We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor node
and a sink node, and devise optimal data compression and transmission policies
with an objective to prolong the lifetime of the sensor node. While applying
compression before transmission reduces the energy consumption of transmitting
the sensed data, blindly applying too much compression may even exceed the cost
of transmitting raw data, thereby losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to
investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy
costs. In this paper, we study the joint optimal compression-transmission
design in three scenarios which differ in terms of the available channel
information at the sensor node, and cover a wide range of practical situations.
We formulate and solve joint optimization problems aiming to maximize the
lifetime of the sensor node whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate
(BER) constraints. Our results show that a jointly optimized
compression-transmission policy achieves significantly longer lifetime (90% to
2000%) as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression.
Importantly, this performance advantage is most profound when the delay
constraint is stringent, which demonstrates its suitability for low latency
communication in future wireless networks.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communicaiton