  In cyber-physical systems where sensors measure the temporal evolution of a
given phenomenon of interest and radio communication takes place over short
distances, the energy spent for source acquisition and compression may be
comparable with that used for transmission. Additionally, in order to avoid
limited lifetime issues, sensors may be powered via energy harvesting and thus
collect all the energy they need from the environment. This work addresses the
problem of energy allocation over source acquisition/compression and
transmission for energy-harvesting sensors. At first, focusing on a
single-sensor, energy management policies are identified that guarantee a
maximal average distortion while at the same time ensuring the stability of the
queue connecting source and channel encoders. It is shown that the identified
class of policies is optimal in the sense that it stabilizes the queue whenever
this is feasible by any other technique that satisfies the same average
distortion constraint. Moreover, this class of policies performs an independent
resource optimization for the source and channel encoders. Analog transmission
techniques as well as suboptimal strategies that do not use the energy buffer
(battery) or use it only for adapting either source or channel encoder energy
allocation are also studied for performance comparison. The problem of
optimizing the desired trade-off between average distortion and delay is then
formulated and solved via dynamic programming tools. Finally, a system with
multiple sensors is considered and time-division scheduling strategies are
derived that are able to maintain the stability of all data queues and to meet
the average distortion constraints at all sensors whenever it is feasible.
