  Energy efficiency is a key requirement for the Internet of Things, as many
sensors are expected to be completely stand-alone and able to run for years
without battery replacement. Data compression aims at saving some energy by
reducing the volume of data sent over the network, but also affects the quality
of the received information. In this work, we formulate an optimization problem
to jointly design the source coding and transmission strategies for
time-varying channels and sources, with the twofold goal of extending the
network lifetime and granting low distortion levels. We propose a scalable
offline optimal policy that allocates both energy and transmission parameters
(i.e., times and powers) in a network with a dynamic Time Division Multiple
Access (TDMA)-based access scheme.
