A Lifetime Maximization Scheme for a Sensor Based MTC Device

For a sensor based machine-type communication (MTC) device, transmission is a power hungry operation and blindly applying too much data compression may even exceed the cost of transmitting raw data, thus losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy costs. We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor based MTC device and a sink node, and devise an optimal data compression and transmission policy with an objective to maximize the lifetime of the sensor based MTC device whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate (BER) constraints when statistical channel gain is known at the sensor node. Our results show that a jointly optimized compression-transmission policy achieves 100% to 1500% better performance as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression under given BER and delay constraints. Importantly, the gain is most profound in the low latency regime.