Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology that will have a major societal, environmental and financial impact. By 2020, it is predicted that there will be more than 50 million interconnected nodes worldwide. WSNs seek to capture compressible analog signals and aim to transmit them reliably to one or more nodes, while maintaining low power consumption. Technical challenges include achieving communication reliability under delay constrains in harsh environments and limiting power consumption to ensure extended lifetimes. Current methods are often highly application-specific. In addition, they do not work well in environments with unknown signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, have limited performance in multiuser scenarios and lack feedback functionality.