  The energy bottleneck in Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) can be reduced by
limiting communication overhead. Application specific source coding schemes for
the sensor networks provide fewer bits to represent the same amount of
information exploiting the redundancy present in the source model, network
architecture and the physical process. This paper reports the performance of
representative codes from various families of source coding schemes (lossless,
lossy, constant bit-rate, variable bit-rate, distributed and joint
encoding/decoding) in terms of energy consumed, bit-rate achieved,
quantization-error/reconstruction-error, latency and complexity of
encoder-decoder(codec). A reusable frame work for testing source codes is
provided. Finally we propose a set of possible applications and suitable source
codes in terms of these parameters.
