To Compress or Not to Compress: Processing Vs Transmission Tradeoffs for Energy Constrained Sensor Networking

In the past few years, lossy compression has been widely applied in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), where energy efficiency is a crucial concern due to the constrained nature of the transmission devices. Often, the common thinking among researchers and implementers is that compression is always a good choice, because the major source of energy consumption in a sensor node comes from the transmission of the data. Lossy compression is deemed a viable solution as the imperfect reconstruction of the signal is often acceptable in WSN, subject to some application dependent maximum error tolerance. Nevertheless, this is seldom supported by quantitative evidence.