Energy-neutral source-channel coding in energy-harvesting wireless sensors

This work addresses the problem of energy allocation over source compression and transmission for a single energy-harvesting sensor. An optimal class of policies is identified that simultaneously guarantees a maximal average distortion and the stability of the queue connecting source and channel encoders, whenever this is feasible by any other strategy. 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.