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 tradeoff 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 compressiontransmission 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. ). This paper is presented in part at IEEE Globecom 2018 [1].
I. INTRODUCTIONThe notion of Internet of things (IoT) calls for novel solutions to realize wireless connectivity across heterogeneous and autonomous wireless devices such as sensors, actuators, etc., which are often referred to as machine-type communication (MTC) devices [2], [3]. The sensor based MTC devices within an IoT system, are supposed to acquire physical information from the environment and transmit it to a central data fusion station while satisfying stringent technical requirements in terms of maximal energy efficiency, ultra-low latency, and application specific rigorous data reliability.Due to their wireless and unattended operation, MTC devices are mostly battery operated and are severely energy constrained. Thus, prolonging the lifetime of these sensor based MTC devices, which is defined as the time taken by the MTC device to deplete all of its energy, is of paramount importance [4]. In the existing literature, the lifetime maximization problem has been approached from different perspectives such as green channel access, sleep-wake scheduling, coverage, efficient routing, network coding, data aggregation, see [4] and the references therein.The low-cost and miniature sized CMOS cameras and microphones have made it possible to acquire multimedia information, i.e., image, audio, and video, from the environment enabling the notion of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN) [5] and Internet of multimedia things (IoMT) [6]. In most of the applications of WMSN and IoMT, the amount of sensed data (raw data) can sometimes be very large, resulting in high transmission cost. In this regard, data compression schemes have been proposed [7-10], wh...