  Wireless sensor nodes need a drastically reduced technical complexity to fit
constraints of future applications. Reducing complexity often results in a
degradation of energy and bandwidth efficiency. An interesting new approach
that promises to reduce both technical complexity and energy consumption is
event-based communication (EBC). While practical low-complexity implementations
of such systems have already been proposed, the general question of energy and
bandwidth efficiency remains open. In this paper, we compare these between EBC
and a system relying on classical uniform sampling. We show that EBC is indeed
much more energy efficient, and this comes at the cost of bandwidth efficiency.
Therefore EBC is particularly suitable in combination with ultra-wideband
communication.
