Analysis of lossy compression and channel coding tradeoff for energy efficient transmission in low power communication systems

Energy efficient transmission is the key performance for low power communication systems. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of things (IoT) have been emerging as the most promising paradigms that envisage the presence of many battery-powered devices, which entail the design of energy-aware communication techniques. Lossy compression allows to save some energy by compressing the packets sent over the network, but at the cost of a poorer accuracy in the representation of the data. The transmitted data over lossy channels is typically affected by both source distortion and channel distortion which results in delayed transmission, data loss and energy dissipation. In this paper, we address the tradeoff between transmission energy efficiency and reliability for energy constrained communication systems. Notably, we highlight an unaware tradeoff between lossy compression and error correction coding (ECC) as a key performance to provide both energy efficiency and reliability. Simulation results and evaluation show that providing both energy efficiency and reliability depends on the optimal allocation between compression data and channel coding's redundancies.